the_snooze

Yeah, the "you're using it wrong" argument falls flat on its face when the technology is presented as an all-in-one magic answer box. Why give these companies the benefit of the doubt instead of holding them accountable for what they claim this tech to be? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bBfYX8X5aU

I like to ask these chatbots to generate 25 trivia questions and answers from "golden age" Simpsons. It fabricates complete BS for a noticeable number of them. If I can't rely on it for something as low-stakes as TV trivia, it seems absurd to rely on it for anything else.

It's a lot of complexity and engineering just to avoid giving food the ol' sniff test. Tech bros need to stop inventing problems for which we already have time-tested solutions.

There's really no difference. If a company must subsidize costs with ad revenue, it clearly shows that they don't want paying customers to be the sole judges of the product's value proposition.

"If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." It's an outdated way of looking at tech. Many classes of paid products (e.g., cars, streaming services, IoT, operating systems) double-dip into tracking and advertisement. Why would a business actually want to do the hard work of serving user needs when they can hedge their bets with ad revenue? Line must go up.

It's not even just children in safe situations like bedtime. I regularly see adults crossing the street typing on their phones while having headphones on.

So much modern tech is just about capture and extraction, not actually empowering the end user. It's as if guitar companies found a way to make more money in claiming royalties on musicians' work instead of building good guitars.

It's a political challenge, not a technical one. There are constituencies that reap concentrated benefits from the current system (e.g., tax-filing services) while imposing disperse costs on everyone else. Also, there are those who believe that the IRS is out to get them, so filing your own taxes is more trustworthy than going with a government-issued pre-filled default. And that going through the motions makes the pain of paying taxes more salient, so you're more likely to complain about it.

If you look at it as a practical or technical challenge, you're addressing the wrong question.

It's about integrity, not confidentiality. Without HTTPS, anyone between you and the server can mess with the content you're receiving. It could be injecting ads, or make the website upside-down [1], or replace downloads with malicious links.

[1] https://pete.ex-parrot.com/upside-down-ternet.html

It's a slot machine. Everything social media and e-commerce is a slot machine. Each scroll is a pull of the arm, hoping that the algorithmic gods will smile kindly on you and give you some sweet content or deal.

Steam is great, in no small part because Valve isn't beholden to quarterly earnings numbers. But I'm worried what will happen when Gabe Newell retires. Valve has been a pretty good (though at times imperfect) steward for PC gaming and it'll be sad if a change in leadership decides to extract value from 20+ years of goodwill.

>ship a new feature and make sure people use it by making it as annoyingly in-your-face as possible, so you can show "impact".

Modern consumer tech in a nutshell. It's less about serving the paying end-user and more about self promotion. There's so much neediness and entitlement in the design.

You're quite right about the relative calm in Linux. It knows it's an operating system, and an OS is supposed to stay out of the way and simply support the user's needs, not be a billboard for junk.

They're cheaper right now because they're operating at a loss. At some point, the bill will come due.

Netflix used to be $8/month for as many streams and password-shares as you wanted for a catalog that met your media consumption needs. It was a great deal back then. But then the bill came due.

Online LLM companies are positioning themselves to do the same bait-and-switch techbro BS we've seen over the last 15+ years.

I think "standing out" in a market of lemons is playing the wrong game. The winning move is to sidestep the market altogether and find a niche where there's a barrier to entry that's both high enough to deter most other competitors but low enough that you can clear it.

It doesn't scale, but that's the point. Direct competition is a loser's game.

It's unclear how you'd even move the thing safely. The shuttle-carrier 747s are literal museum pieces now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Carrier_Aircraft#Retir...

I guess they can disassemble/reassemble it or move it whole with huge flatbed trucks, but both risk damaging the vehicle.

>The ease of access to information has geared us towards efficiently looking up information instead of remembering it.

Tech companies want us to be dependent on their information lookup services, while simultaneously not making those services dependable and predictable long-term.

The thing is that professors and research groups aren't fungible. Each one that moves represents a nontrivial loss in expertise for the US in some field. There are only so many groups doing basic research into materials science for microelectronics, for example---certainly not at all 187 R1 universities. But something like that is a strategic asset for the US, to the point that there's a DARPA office specifically to fund that work (https://www.darpa.mil/about/offices/mto).

Another factor is if they're all from the same (sub)discipline. It doesn't take a lot of established researchers moving to shift a field's center of gravity somewhere else. When you start seeing research conferences that used to be in the US be held elsewhere instead, you'll know that the change has happened.

If you're the one declining the invite, the onus is on you to clarify which it is, not for the initiator to guess your intentions. In my life, I usually decline with "That doesn't work for me, but how about ${ALTERNATIVE_PLAN}?" It signals that the invitation is welcome, but doesn't work for practical reasons, so I'll return the kindness by proposing something else and leaving the other person in a clear and actionable position.

As the parent comment said, clarity is kindness. If you're leaving people guessing, then you're being very unkind.

I think the fact that so many people (myself included) interpreted it as Anna declining everything demonstrates that the article is poorly written. Even a quick signpost mid-piece like "parties obviously weren't Anna's scene, but she was a regular at our dinner table" would have made things much clearer.

There's a big difference between inviting a regular to something they may or may not like, and inviting someone who's absent for everything.

If it's indeed specifically about party invites and not other things, then you're right and I misread it. I wish the author were more explicit about that beyond just a fleeting line at the beginning "We ended up hanging out quite a bit during those early months."

My read was that Anna never acted like she's actually part the group because she's only ever shown repeatedly declining invitations.

We're talking about different things here. In the linked article, Anna never accepts the invitation, nor does she propose alternatives. It's OK for someone to intiate contact more often than others, as long as the counterparty actually accepts the invitation every so often (or picks up the phone or chats or responds positively). That's not the case with Anna, who repeatedly says "nah" in the face of consistent kindness and consideration.

Extending an invitation is indeed a kindness. But repeatedly declining them signals that the invitations are unwelcome and unvalued. It's really that simple. Relationships aren't one-sided.

If agents are making value judgments ostensibly on my behalf, why should I trust them to continue to be aligned with my values if in practice they're almost always running on someone else's hardware and being maintained on someone else's budget?

We'd be stupid to ignore the last 15+ years of big tech "democratization"-to-enshittification bait-and-switch.

You're missing a very important limiting factor: battery life. You can't fit a lot of battery in the space of a credit card, and you can't exactly count on unwitting carriers to properly recharge and maintain them.

Given those constraints, practical applications would be severely limited. As the article mentions, it's probably undercover personnel who are carrying these. The power budget would likely rule out remote access or remote streaming. I'm guessing these credit card snitches are little more than local audio/video recorders with very limited run time.

>It's not clear, but I believe the page content is only shared once a prompt is made intending to use the page's content.

If it's only processing page content as the user requests it, then how would feature 4 "Find webpages you previously visited" work? Seems like it would need to process everything in order to enable prompt-based content recall.

There's something exhausting about having to fight against a tool that's constantly trying to undermine your intentions.

Absolutely, classes were the magic bullet for me. I found a gym that offers small-ish (~15) classes, approachable instructors who emphasize good form, and a location and schedule that fits my lifestyle. Thanks to that, I've been a regular for the past few years now, going to class 3 or 4 times a week after being a lazy slob during the height of COVID.

Classes also reduce the barrier to start because you don't have to think about what your workout will look like, and you'll push yourself just a little harder when you're exercising with others.

I like to take a tiered approach, placing way more importance on news 1s of miles away from me than 100s or 1000s of miles away from me. If there's a water main break or police activity or interesting new construction happening near me, that's the news that matters. What happens on the opposite end of the country has little bearing on my day-to-day life, so why give it a disproportionate amount of attention? It's trivia for all intents and purposes.

It's basically a cult at that point. Isolate the followers, give them the carrot of purpose in life, and give them the stick of getting cast out.

I do most of my gaming in the single-player indie space these days. It's really where the fun is. You have a deep time-tested catalog of beautiful and complete experiences that don't try to nickel-and-dime you with drip-fed content or recurring microtransactions. They're games first and foremost, not extraction machines. It's the opposite of the BS you see in big-budget titles.