neura

I struggle to see the tech/data being used in that way. At a much higher level, the data is more likely anonymized (where possible) and/or not directly exposed to anybody. Think of the initial github copilot that used source code across all of the repos and how it was able to take instructions for what you wanted to build and give you essentially a consensus built piece of code that fit what you asked for, be it by auto-completion, comments, or direct requests.

"I want to build a business that does X using Y. Give me revenue predictions, spend over time, and customer demand predictions." etc

IMHO, this is not the point. The core problem is that they're building systems that will remove competition altogether. You may still get your current systems to market ahead of your competition, but future "competitors" will be built off of your data and Atlassian will be one more company in the list of companies profiting from everybody else building systems using their data, probably destined to fail because everybody else can do it just as easily, but the money required to fund Atlassian's systems that built it for them, however large or small, will have already been sent. Those systems that Atlassian will profit from will be built from the data of "customers", who also paid Atlassian will giving up their own data.

With almost zero control over whether or not this happens (politically or individually), the only reasonable action to take is "take advantage while there's an advantage to be had".

Worse off, if anything.

Yes, it would be great if there were literally any other comparison other than repeated but slightly different views of Feb vs Mar in 2026 only.

Same issue with Switch 2. You can only wake it with a Switch 2 controller. Nintendo's own Pro Controller for switch, which used to wake the Switch just fine, cannot wake the Switch 2. Seems like a forced upgrade issue, to me. :(

I do not believe that _you_ are trolling with this question, but answering this is just asking to be trolled.

That said. Fortnite. Yes, I still play it with friends and cannot play it on Mac or Linux. :(

I'm sure others have similar examples. Also there are just simple things like playing with friends and streaming on Discord. Anybody streaming from Windows always comes across smooth and HD to the other participants while anybody on Linux seems to consistently be received (I don't know where exactly in the chain the problem exists, so just "received", as it may not be a broadcasting or encoding problem, I'm not an expert in this) with a lot of artifacts and lower framerates.

This is both somewhat funny, but also sad. Such a mood. :D

A pretty cool one, at that!

Even your description sounds like a startup, to me.

There was a hook to get the funding (easy to get weapons funding in wartime). Recruiting the top talent. Urgency (beat everybody else to the punch). Outsourcing the building of infrastructure while you focus on the unique/hard part.

I'm not seeing how you can't see the parallels with startups.

I love that this comment came up directly after (at the time I'm writing this comment) "Math doesn't care about your feelings."

I've tried to explain this a couple of times, but I keep falling back on the calculations used to show the problem (that it's not the numbers themselves, but the pattern). This comment nailed it with simply "It's that they're all round numbers". I've always been terrible at rephrasing things to make stronger points in a more concise way. Thanks! :D

It's more that if you start with those clean, single decimal percentages and a total number of votes, you'd end up with decimals for number of votes, which isn't possible. So if you then remove the decimal from the votes, you get slightly different percentage values when taken to 7 decimal places, but the original decimals would still be the same.

The chances of those numbers occurring normally for all 3 vote counts together is just ridiculously tiny.

I think you are correct, but that's missing the point of the article's content. I'm just a programmer, not a math expert, but I believe these statements are accurate.

1. It's very easy to arrive at the provided values, if you make up some percentages that only go to a single decimal value (1/10th). Though doing so would result in vote counts that are decimal, as well. Then if you just remove the decimal from those values, the given percentages don't change enough to be incorrect, but even when taken to 7 decimal places, the new values are pretty clearly due to the rounding (44.2%: 44.1999989%, 4.6%: 4.6000039%).

2. While yes, the chance of these vote counts coming up in this kind of pattern is similar to the example you provided, even if you were using 0-9 for your example of 6 values, the total combinations is about an order of magnitude less than the total vote count provided here.

3. The finer point made is that there's a very small chance for one of the vote counts to show up as a number that so nicely fits the single decimal percentage, but in this case, all 3 vote counts fit this pattern. The calculations are shown for just 2 of the candidates (so not including the "other") resulting only a 1 in 100 million chance.

I hear what you're saying and somewhat agree, but as with everything, I really don't think "it's that simple".

First, that you're even using Google search or Gmail is providing Google with data they use for marketing. On top of the data those services take in (what you search for, what you click on in the results, how much time you spend watching one video compared to another, what mailing lists you're subscribed to, etc. etc.) they are provided tracking information from the majority of sites you visit (either directly or aggregated from other services). That allows them to let their customers market directly to you or even provide data to other companies (for a fee) so they can market to you more successfully (than not having that data).

Even when paying for a service, the next step is to add ads back into it.

For example, as a paying customer Amazon Video used to let you just watch the movies/shows they had available. Then they started advertising movies that they didn't have available to stream, but you could purchase or rent them. Then they started adding in ads for content that was available on 3rd party services. Now they have in-content ads that you can pay extra to remove.

They're not the only company doing this, but it was just the first/easiest example I could call up that shows a progression of what a company does when they already have your attention/money.

You can see that Google has become progressively more aggressive in pushing ads in their search over the years. They didn't have ads at first, worked their way up to being the "standard" search engine, then started putting ads between results, eventually getting to where we are today. I can do a search today and the entire first screen of results (1080p, zoom level 100%) is just sponsored results. One usually has to scroll a full page to get to any "real" results, assuming that the top non-sponsored results aren't skewed by "the algorithm", which might include things like whether or not the target page uses GA, has ads that benefit Google, conform to what Google thinks is "relevant" (very loose term) basically.

I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to find an excessive amount of examples where services that started making money with a simple product you could pay for, then turned to subscriptions, then turned to add-ons for the subscription, then just started pushing ads into their service regardless if you're already paying or not.

"Probably shouldn't have used N95 though"... gee, ya think? :P I would like to think that it's clear to everybody that they absolutely should not have claimed that it's even "N95 Grade", which clearly indicates that it's an approved as N95, but is roughly similar.

The actual stats are that it reached, at maximum, with the fan running, 86.3% filtration. That's almost 3x the amount of crap getting through than an actual N95 certified mask (without needing a fan).

How does this erode your confidence in the FTC? Maybe you missed the FTC report where they stated the maximum filtration they were able to reach was 86% and that was the maximum, with most tests hitting much lower.

Even calling the mask "N95 Grade", which is an obvious statement that it didn't pass actual testing, is a major problem. It's vague enough that most will believe that it is equivalent to one that has actually passed testing. When it's supposed to catch 95% and catches 10% less, that's _triple_ the amount of crap passing through.

If you read through the FTC documents, you can see that they (Razer) knew it would not pass and so went with the strategy of getting people to believe that it was the same, without any proof.

The FTC could not prevent them from releasing the product or immediately cause them to remove it from market as Razer did not claim that it was N95 certified. Razer knew exactly what they were doing in getting around this and now they're paying the price for doing so, while the FTC sets an example for others that "if you even imply that your product is equivalent to being certified, we'll pin you for it."

Is this simply because the bookmark manager linked (Floccus) is not available for Safari?

Or better yet, can you elaborate on how any of the content up the chain from your comment that shows why Safari shouldn't be considered a user friendly browser?

I agree so much with this. I was excited for the feature until the first 10 seconds. I don't want a fake DJ "talking to me" or attempting to emulate a radio DJ. It's not like all I have to look at is a dial with numbers on it. I can see all the details of what you're playing, thanks. Shut up and just let me see if I like what you think I'll like, enough that it makes me feel that your recommendations won't be immediate rejections. Or just have the dumb AI talk to me about it, so I know that I absolutely do not want to use the feature. sigh

0/10 indeed

Complete plays is a fair metric, if it doesn't take into consideration related traits like when I love a particular remix of a song that is very different than the original, the system decides that I loved the original song and is now going to recommend songs similar to or liked by other users of the system that liked that original song.

This is another place where Pandora really set themselves apart, the Music Genome Project. Any given track that went through curation has a (possibly very) large set of attributes assigned to it. This song you liked, it has a heavy bass-line, noticeable amount of shuffle, light drums, syncopated rhythms, etc. That's far better (to me) than "you might like other songs by this artist" or "other listeners of this artist also listen to", where the last one gets really sketchy when there's not a lot of listeners for the artist.

I'm also curious how it treats listening to a track on a Spotify station that is mixed, where they transition in to and out of the track late or early, so you won't hear the full track, does that still count?

Heck, sometimes I'll get almost to the end of the track and skip to the next just because the track has a long tail and I want to get to something that has more energy, not the dwindling remains of the rhythm or some soft piano fade out at the end of a 130 BPM track that had a lot of energy throughout most of it.

If they're going to make all of these sometimes seemingly arbitrary judgements of whether or not I like something based on these weird things like "there's a common English word in the playlist title that also shows up in all these song titles we're going to recommend to you", at least a list or chart of how it works somewhere would be nice, so I can make more effective use of the system.

Not when it's recommending something it _should_ already know I like (and probably why it added it to the list). Also, sometimes, I may like something, but not add it to my personal list. Since there's no way to rate a song, I use likes only for songs I really like.

I think the real point to be made here is that this is part of the inner workings of the system, that most users of the system are unaware of. Hell, this article and the ensuing discussions do not leave it completely clear how much of the system works. Like, I despise that when I create a new playlist with a name, it recommends a bunch of tracks based on the name of the playlist. Sometimes that'll be tracks with words in the name of the playlist in their name or some other odd metric, like it'll add songs from an artist that has a song that happens to be the name of the playlist. If you don't puzzle this out for yourself, you're possibly creating a very UN-optimized playlist for yourself.

You're comparing video streaming services (one of them a live streaming service) that have far more cost per user, to something that has far more minimal costs. You're also comparing individual account cost per user that includes much more than just API access.

Where is your evidence or even subjective knowledge about Reddit being the company that's trying the hardest to make this work?

Also, to answer your initial question, regardless of anything else in your comment, the rate is absurd because it clearly falls under bait and switch. Build up your userbase, including offering your content from an API until you're basically the monopoly in your market and then start charging per month, per user, for API access. It's not like individual users are paying for their API access and feeding that API key to other apps to use. It's clearly meant to crush 3rd party apps, not facilitate Reddit making money through 3rd party apps. They can make far more money through their own massively ad infested app without providing any of the features that make other apps attractive, if they just crush 3rd party apps. In which case, why both charging for the API. As others have suggested, why not just shut it down or limit it? Simply because they want to appear as if they're not shutting out the world, while still doing exactly that.

Yeah... was wondering if it eventually learns that digging straight down is more likely to kill you than any other direction or if it could ever learn to down down only when standing on the edge of another block, instead of the one you're breaking.

I really think this is a "to each, his own" concept.

May work great for some people. May be terrible for others.

The internet is a wonderful place for the open exchange of ideas, if you just treat them as such.

I seriously think that the specific range of hours was not at all the point of the example. Would you disagree?

If you're going to nit-pick, my kid starts school at 9am, so I can't start work before 9am. What about remote workers and the example of walking around the office?

I'm pretty sure the example was specifically to note that cutting off their work hours was a successful tactic with respect to leaving them with something to start in the morning, vs letting them finish what they're working on and then have to figure out what/how to get started on in the morning.

Literally the point of the article there, leaving your work unfinished or broken, as it were, so you can just jump in knowing the next thing you were already going to do last night, but forced yourself not to or were forced to not finish.

> I can't but that doesn't mean there are none.

I think the point here is that now you can. Your "AI" can draw it for you with extreme accuracy and then... is it yours? That's the real question here. Pretty simple.

What if we had a copyright law that did give like a percent of detail that has to be different, so you make a new drawing that has the required amount of difference, and it's yours right? Now your "AI" can be trained to make differences in drawings that specifically meet the requirement of however much difference between the original and yours will negate the ability of the original author to make a copyright claim. Pretty straightforward. It's not the case now, but when we have enough content that has to be judged by humans on whether or not it falls under copyright... Anyhoo... I'm not selling content, so I shouldn't care, right?</snark>

Is that any more accurate though? I agree that the headline is snark, but... content creators are a large part of the problem, though it's such a complex problem that I'm not sure how to even guess at which is more liable unless you simply take the "whoever is the last in the production line has the ability to prevent this kind of content" view, in which case it's pretty obviously ... well, I was going to say obvious the content provider, but no... it's you. The problem is likely you, and your inability to avoid this kind of content.</more-snark>

I think this was an issue that was really only an issue for specific geographic areas, but also an easy bandwagon to jump on and look like you're "fighting the good fight". It was an actual problem in one area from my childhood, but never saw it anywhere else.

Otherwise, fully and wholeheartedly agree that it's now a global issue and is indeed real. Welcome to the "global community" we were always told was going to be such an advancement for society.

Yeah, it's very much a game of "well, other people fit this profile, but also tend to watch this other thing, we should recommend that, as it will probably hook this person as well. With any luck, they'll be grateful that we introduced them!"

I just want to note one little difference. "The internet and the >perceived< options it gives, ..."

I had an ex that did this based on fantasy novels. "Why can't you be more of a man's man?" "What, from your romance novels?" "Yes!" "Ummm..."

Ironically, the thought never even occurred to me to respond with "Why can't you be more of a <insert stereotypical sought after characterization here>?"

Oh well, we haven't been together for a long time. :)

Point being, it's not just instagram or even social media at large. They've just made the situation worse. This is deep rooted in most of society and isn't going to end any time soon. Just need to find people that are strong enough to not fall victim to this (even if they don't bring it up, like our partners did).