kossTKR

I don't buy this progress analogy. I'm from Scandinavia where we have Bang&Olufsen which were early adopters of touch controls, and it never came to sit well with me, knobs are still better.

I also used to produce music and buttons were always better, more tactile, then comes latency which is another modern problem - imagine a touch piano with 40ms delay, not good.

Someone also mentioned militaries changed back from touch to knobs because you'd never get the same speed and "feel".

I'm convinced the human mammal is simply adapted to use our hands with tools and materials that give good solid, instant feedback with lots of tactility, texture, depth and even sound and we'll hopefully realise this in the UX world.

Regarding the "who even looks at a speedometer" is just bizarre to me as a city/provincial driver also in Scandinavia. You need to look there continuously as speed limits more or less constantly change when driving here; from 30, to 50, then 40, then 80, then 30 and going more than 30% over you can get a huge fine and 1/3 strike to get your license revoked, ie. you actually have to glance quite a bit which i guess is why car manufacturers have put speedometers there for 100 years, isn't this a normal part of driving a car?

To me teslas are still annoying and dangerous because of a bunch of small things last time i rented one, like buying a great computer, but the screen colours are inverted:

1) No buttons but shit quality touch "areas in places you have to guess" on steering wheel, is straight up dangerous, and incredibly annoying because you can't "get a feel" for anything you have to do, ie. turn lights, wipers etc.

2) No other knobs for sound, climate etc. instead touch screen. Same thing stupid, slow and dangerous.

3) No speedometer, "just look constantly to the right and down" ok now it's getting in to joke territory.

4) Shit interior.

A Renault Zoe cheap mini car is easier in day to day use because of this.

True, the fact we now also have LLM models at 2.7B parameters that are "actually coherent and useful for niche work" like PHI-2 on my Macbook Air running super fast at 25 t/s or 12 t/s for Mistral_0.2 as an _somewhat_ knowledgable assistant / coder - is crazy!

Coherent models required dozens of billions of parameters just a year ago and something like Mistral was closer to 70B and reserved for server farms or crazy setups.

Locallama on Reddit has outdated info in from just a few months ago.

True but you could make the api restricted, having certain routes completely locked, some requiring double checks, some requiring on screen approval or face-id, throttling outside fetches, only being able to run get and not etc, no financial app control etc.

But yeah "hey siri transfer all of my funds to eric", or "hey siri group all of my photos where i'm nude and send them to jack" are new almost sci fi vectors.

Eh no, 7B Mistral / Deepseek would certainly almost already be able to function as a super Siri, but probably something closer to PHI-2 + the new MLX apple optimisations. Have you tried those? https://twitter.com/awnihannun/status/1735355067673526360

If trained on an iPhone API + documentation and given a little web access it would blow absolutely everything out of the water.

If they can already create -basic- Python/Swift/JS/rust apps that sets timers, save things, create lists, how's that too dumb for being a Siri replacement? They just have to give it access to an iPhone/Web Api like ChatGPT's code analysis tool.

So if you ask it "hey siri do this, this and this", it will create a script, then run it on the internal API, or fetch an article then work on that etc.

I know it's still logically "dumb" but i'm not trying to play game theoretical scenarios with my phone or do logic tests or advanced math (yet).

Tangent but why does so many companies keep hiring consulting companies (a little different) that come in and do nothing but waste everyone's time - is it yet another managerial class excess / nepotism / business theatre or is there some benefit i just don't see?

I've seen this countless times both in both Tech and the NGO world - some roadmap is running pretty good, managers then hire a bunch of "cool looking people that come in with a big old white board to make a cool workshop" then follow the process for a short amount of time, giving extremely shitty advice because they haven't been involved in the process at all and are going to leave soon without delivering anything.

And the fact that they are often paid a higher wage than the people who have to actually clean up after their crap advice is straight up offensive. And it seems everyone i know have this impression in both softer and harder sectors.

I've only met a few "lone wolf" consultants in Tech that were nice, people often with a huge passion and knowledge for something concrete and not "passion for leadership / some bullshit organisational fad".

Okay this right here is PR.

This is perception management by an oligarch.

I wonder if physiognomy will come back as a field, if AI scans like these have any validity.

I remember stumbling upon multiple esoteric accounts on both Twitter and Tiktok with communities seemingly obsessed with characterising various psychological traits from purely looking at facial features, importantly without racial undertones.

While this on the surface sounds ridiculous and has various horrible historical echoes, i've always had a hunch there was actually something to this science from a purely intuitive perspective and knowing lots of people - again very importantly disregarding anything about race - instead focusing on the myriad of hormone linked features, neurotypicalism, alcohol, environmental factors, whatever traits that seemingly somehow go "across races".

Or maybe there's nothing there.

Are people actually using this to 10x themselves / create actually profitable services already?

Or more like finetuning a model to have an edge on the leaderboards for a day or two then taking VC money, or integrating som "AI magic" into existing userbases?

I've been following the locallama sub on reddit and the few services created seem very niche besides tons of hobby stuff.

Great news. Adobe is already the kind of company that should be forcefully closed down for scamming people with their subscription practices.

The sign up, and cancelling process of their various services are so "dark design" it's criminal. I've had to wait in a chat window for days to have a service cancelled after signing up for something i clearly didn't sign up for, a yearly payment instead of a monthly with no warning for a very expensive suit, and many are in the same boat almost bankrupting entire small companies.

More and more places does this and they should all banned and their CEO's put in jail because they prey on vulnerable people, steal millions and waste everyone else's time.

I'm not kidding one bit with the jail thing, lines have been crossed so much it's getting ridiculous now, i don't care how rich or powerful you are. This is why we need strict regulation and serious consequences for CEO's and shareholders of straight up criminal companies.

A nanoscopic amount of artists sabotaging a few images will not do anything to anyone, there'll just be a small version bump in vision models and the 0.0000001 contaminated images will also be classified correctly.

While i really feel for the artist like everyone else potentially losing their livelihood to AI, this is an annoying fantasy story.

I can recommend the app GrandPerspective to find files like these sitting around.

Never used Xcode as anything other than a dependency for other dev stuff and in that case it's huge, takes ages to install, doesn't clean itself after installation and easily fills 50-100 gigabytes with useless "simulators" that has no relevance for most.

Just curious if uBlock was still king as i'm using Safari/Orion since some time ago because of battery life.

Isn't uBlock origin the much better option for Firefox?

And if so there should be some community effort to remove these scammy and deceptive alternatives.

Yes, i'm pretty sure no more than 5% of breches and leaks gets public press.

There's so many internal company filters a breach has to go through to become public all the way from some engineer messing up and "just closing the terminal" with a beating heart hoping no one will notice - to a long chain of managers who has to send the message upwards, then the leadership approving public disclosure, all with negative pressure to not disclose because of career, stress, extra work, penalties, all the way to stakeholder value.

I feel like theres a potential for B2B solutions in this space. Especially for workers who want to bootstrap something quick, avoid something like Teams or other behemoths, create something for a one time survey, campaign, shorter process etc.

So much was lost transitioning from web 2.0 to whatever walled dystopian garbage we have now.

The concept of pipes are way back from the Unix days, and the idea of this modularity and later building stuff from a flow based interface like this somehow never translated into anything on the frontend side.

I've been met with simple specs that had to be built with custom web solutions a few times now where i've almost started building a generalised model like this that could scale because most apps could be defined like this, as entities related with filters between them in sequences related to each other and web views where people could interact.

The closest i found back then was something like Airtable/Zapier combinations that was extremely limited.

You either have a bad screen or limited eyesight, it's quite funny to me that this is the most upvoted comment.

There's definitely very ugly "banding" going on in the gradients on the WebP versions i say as someone who's worked extensively with UX and interfaces.

I'm on a M2 Macbook Air.

Thanks for the examples.

I've used SD / Midjourney / Dalle extensively and would say this is honestly shockingly bad besides the two last ones.

Comparable to the first versions of the other services, but with better contextual understanding but still with lots of gnarly artifacts and weirdness going on.

Ledger has been hacked so many times now i've lost count.

I remember buying one in 2019, and shortly thereafter all customer data was dumped on the internet endangering everyone who bought one.

Then after deep diving the tech i threw it in the trash, it seemed like security theatre product.

There's also been so many phishing attempts, fake ledgers sold, bricked ones losing funds, it's total shitshow that ecosystem if you check their subreddit going back in time.

The more you rely on 3. parties, and the more obfuscated your setup is, the more unsafe your data is. I just use isolated cheap laptops and encrypted usb's now.

You've got to be kidding me. This almost deserves its own post.

That last picture is still so horribly bad it's no wonder Google made it almost impossible to access this tech.

How did Google drop the ball on AI like this when they pioneered the entire field?

Personally i've found engineering / designer types, including myself, often a bit on various adhd/autism like spectrums with tendencies to overwork, hyperfocus and in general "attach themselves very much to some domain", not that this is always a good thing.

I've met many from the managerial class without these traits that seem to have no problem coasting and trancending actual meticulous work because their game is all about personal career management, not the hyperfocus a lot of us here engage in daily.

This is giving me ptsd flashbacks from working with gCloud from weird "console" pages hidden deep in some yggdrasil sized tree structure with undocumented apis and labyrinthian authentication processes unknown to everyone even Google themselves.

Yeah seriously this is a joke by now. Good research, but product wise they are like the slowest behemoth, impossible to contact, extremely convoluted in their communication and their interfaces like a kafkaesque maze.

Open AI really shows us how it's done, or the way Mistral just dumps a torrent on everyone. That's marketing i can respect.

This reminds me of the year i had to use GCloud/Ads/Analytics and their respective interfaces which seemingly had no connections and changed randomly hour to hour.

Simple features so bizarrely complex and hidden that turning an instance off, checking visitors for a page or other trivial matters seriously required hiring a full time "google interface understander", i kid you not.

Kafka on steroids.

Let me know if i’m reading the sources at the bottom wrong.

Israel supported Hamas as a tactic to destroy their neighbours without restraint as classical war strategy called divide and conquer as most history or war nerds know it.

It's unsurprising classical geopolitics as known from academia 25 years ago before 9/11.

This is an important aspect when people support the measures, the 6000+ bombed kids or that palestinians just voted for them with other options.

In reality the Hamas support, blockades, and forced poverty in Gaza were part of a military plan to create desperation, hellish conditions and radicalisation from constant oppression to eventually weaken or annex depending on sources.

This has been known for long internally in the Israeli press, even mentioned in Wall Street Journal and other mainstream media in the past then called "conspiracy", before again surfacing today with the NYT articles.

Examples below with lots of sources:

The New York Times (today): https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-q...

Wall Street Journal (2008/2023): https://web.archive.org/web/20090926212507/http:/online.wsj.... https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hamas-gaza-humanitaria...

The Intercept (2018): https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-c...

Haaretz (2023): https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-20/ty-article-op...

I've been to Israel and follow the conflict pretty extensively.

The "Meat shield" disinfo is in the grand scheme of things nothing but a gross excuse for the extreme casualties, just like the 40 dead babies thing, or "cave complexes below every hospital" or other campaign PR like "we are doing it because of WMD's in iraq". It's excuses to dominate.

Most has been debunked if you follow independent media. But it seems most here doesn't. US media is highly pro war and for some reason peddles these lies over and over again like Iraq, Afghanistan or so many other wars.

Most people were just regular farmers. That you think a whole region were bloodthirsty barbarians really says more about the racism of american media than anything else.

Most people are regular families just living everywhere on earth throughout all times. That's the beauty of humans, but war campaigns vilifies people so we can dominate them to "protect" us.

The Yemen civil war is 9 years. So on average 1300 kids a month? If the Israeli military has killed 8000 kids, that's in two months, so way more than even the dirtiest of other wars, and really the west should be held to higher standards. I tried to check and multiple NGO's have confirmed that 6000-8000 dead kids is the real number and the death tolls have usually been correct from the palestinian side even if it sounds weird. Talking about this makes me sick though.

More than 6000 thousand kids have died in the span of 2 months or so.

The most powerful militaries in the world, and more than 12.000 civilians already dead, packed together tightly as in a prison with nowhere to flee bombs raining down on them.

I don't get why anyone can support that. No matter the pretext. History going back over 75 years with so much suffering on both sides, but death tolls magnitudes larger on the palestinian side. A side that was just mostly regular farmers before the first Nakba but slowly became radicalised.

This conflict will surely radicalise the rest. Is that an active strategy? According to leaks in the Intercept it actually is: https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-c...

Hamas was created as an active divide and conquer strategy.

The two parties both represent the same class interests with slight differences in a thin veneer of identity politics.

There's never been an alternative to vote for, and every attempt gets smeared in the media owned by the two-party system representing the oligarchs.

Candidates like Bernie who's still in line with most of above policies are showcased as alternatives but the distribution of power is never challenged outside of the arena of identity political circus boosted by conglomerate media.

Obama was also good example of this, PR outsider on the surface but in reality funded by the same bankers and continued global US adventurism.

Politics is downstream from elite interests when they own the media, the parties, the candidates and intermingle with the security state to take care of the rest.

This becomes especially apparent when looking back at the media landscape pre mergers, where a plurality of opinion and research existed from well respected classical journalists challenging local and state power, in what would today be smeared as conspiracy theorising or anti-patriotism while the overton window has become microscopic unless towing the line for the unfathomably rich.