Dave.

There was a point, about 10-12 years ago now, where The Algorithm™ took over social media entirely.

If you were around before that, you would have noticed the shift. Your friend’s comments and posts started to get intermixed with “other stuff” , and eventually you could scroll endlessly and not see anything from your direct friends, or friends of friends. Forever.

What decided what you could see? Why, The Algorithm™ , of course. So, at that point right there, that’s when a direct and consistently biased feed of someone else’s opinion about what you wanted to see got pumped into people’s brains. And you can bet it’s going to be designed to be handing out the most engaging things that it can find for you, to keep you scrolling away on their platform. But it doesn’t matter a fuck if what its handing out i’s mentally harmful to you personally, as long as you’re engaged.

And just like schoolkids in the USA reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, reinforcement of whatever The Algorithm™ wants (simply: more engagement) becomes pretty trivial when it’s crammed into your head consistently from a young age. Lacking any other reference points, children are the ones with the least amount of defenses against all of that shite.

These kinds of laws worldwide are trying to stop that kind of thing from happening, because they can’t stop the source directly. Social media companies hold too much sway over the population and the economy now, it would be political suicide to try and go toe to toe with them.

In my opinion, The Algorithm™ as it stands now is a cancer that needs to be cut out of social media by any means possible. Whether there’s anything left remaining after that is debatable.

the pursuit of fancy graphics just doesn’t make sense anymore

Their assertion is that fancy graphics doesn’t necessarily equal good gameplay, and the major industry players are focused on ever-increasing frame rates instead of game quality.

Nobody cares if your game is fully immersive and rendered down to the atomic scale if it is boring or the game mechanics are shite. Sure you can wander around and look at stuff and gasp at the physics, but unless the game is titled “Look around and enjoy it” , that’s not the point.

it is really more useful than Katie from Sales getting skin cancer on a beach in Thailand or that…

A large chunk of air transport is also freight. And business. And regular domestic travel for people going from A to B, travel that doesn’t include holidays for Kate or that drunk dude in Mallorca.

And when you look at those uses, AI is still running a pretty distant second place.

It seems that every new release adds another layer of indirection (misdirection?) between you and the useful stuff you need to access. I use a third party utility to manage IP settings, and it’s one click from its menu to get to the network adapter page. It takes me about 5 minutes of angry clicking around in stock standard win11 before I get to the same place.

The main one I use is the network adaptor settings, where you can enable/disable protocols and most importantly for me, where you can easily add multiple IP addresses on a network adaptor.

The Win 8+ network settings page is an absolute trainwreck. I particularly like how it doesn’t warn about conflicting IP addresses now and just silently accepts your given address and provides an auto-assigned 169.254 address instead if it sees even the smallest hint of another computer out there using the address you want to use.

Guaranteed fun and confusion trying to access/ping things until you finally check the status of the network adaptor and discover the auto assigned address, thanks Microsoft.

Not everyone wants to use dhcp, which is clearly their preferred direction, and there have been bugs where Cisco devices trigger that flip to auto assigned addresses even if things are fine.

Microsoft applied a data-driven approach to find out which features to add now, which features to add later, and which to completely avoid.

Which is why if you dig deep enough into Settings you’ll see WinXP Control Panel UI elements. You know, the elements that are actually useful for power users.

the killswitch is in about:config

Ah yes, the easiest place to put a kill switch for the average user, as opposed to the complexity of a toggle in settings.

Which is worse?

• Entire driver written in a non memory safe language?
• The interface to the rest of the kernel is marked as unsafe and then the other X percent is safe from memory corruption?

Surely if X > 0 then this is still a net improvement?

If you read the phrasing carefully it’s quite clear that it will be doing things to the codebase, just “with oversight”.

How much oversight? Not sure, just some assurances that there will be oversight.

Vibe coding is essentially just a different phrase for that.

So, after sifting through all the other breathless articles from their website it seems that they’re going to :

• Use a LLM to attempt to sort out their documentation.
• Have a chatbot trained on the docs so you can ask it questions and possibly get coherent answers.
• Some sort of vague thing where the LLM provides guidance and suggestions on improvements to the codebase.

Lots of reassurance that they’re not going to let it do vibe coding but to be honest, they doth protest a little too much methinks.

entirely separate and much more sophisticated technology

Or some math nerd will come up with an algorithm for general AI that is embarrassingly simple, and before you know it the “but can it run Doom?” crowd are implementing AI in toasters and watching them have existential crises for the lulz.

As is tradition.

Search engines should have an off button for ai,

Techbros won’t let that happen, because they’re all terrified that consumers will just shut off all the AI being crammed into everything and all their money will evaporate.

The gains compound a bit too, 20 percent less weight equals proportionally less battery capacity required to shift the now-lighter vehicle from point A to point B.

So then you can cut the size of the battery while maintaining the same range, and that’s where you start to get significant overall weight and cost savings.

This is entirely the wrong community for this answer, but I’ve used the pro version of Textra for 10 years now. One time payment (10 years ago), updates every few months, lots of features, but they don’t get in your way if you don’t need them.

The main feature I use is “delay send for 5 seconds” to allow me to catch all my spelling and grammatical errors after I hit send , but the rest of the UI is pretty well thought out.

One of the very few commercial Android apps that I’d recommend to someone.

Fossify Messages is your trusted messaging companion

I hate this kind of advertising language.

Don’t sell this as some fait accompli , done deal thing. It’s not anything to me at the moment. It doesn’t need to be my “messaging companion”. It needs to be a program, that I use to send and receive SMS/MMS messages. That’s it.

And “trusted”? I’ll be the judge of that.

Can it be disabled?

Sure! There’ll be a dialog box that comes up every single time that you wake your PC saying:

“Do you want to activate AwesomeAI™ now? 98 percent of the functions of this OS are crippled or unusable until you activate AwesomeAI™ so Microsoft recommends doing so immediately.”

And the two options will be “OMG Yes!” , or “Maybe Later”.

The problem is that the “release a minimum viable product, then update-update-update” software development model has reached cars.

But all other ways cost more and take longer to get to market which makes shareholders unhappy, so we can’t have that.

Posts in linux@lemmy.ml are on average about 4 or 5 hours apart. I think we can squeeze these kinds of posts in amidst the hustle and bustle in here.

It’s really more about the overall flavor of the spreadsheet than how “right” any individual field is.

Just like the Xerox copier/scanners that helpfully kept scanned images small by reusing parts of the image elsewhere. Like, all these 6s on your scanned invoices can totally be replaced with 8s. There’s just a tiny degradation in the overall image, it shouldn’t be a problem!

Xerox should have just called it AI compression and people would have been throwing money at them.