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avgd

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avgd
·в прошлом году·discuss
>He has a Bachelor's Degree in Economics.

Must have been worth as much as toilet paper considering his history of bankruptcies. I would be highly suspect of every person involved in letting him earn a degree in anything.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2016/live-updates/ge...

Trump's greatest talent is in lying with a straight face, then finding explanations for the lies:

>Why the discrepancy? Perhaps this will give us an idea: Trump told Washington Post reporters that he counted the first three bankruptcies as just one.

His failed businesses include money printing machines aka casinos.
avgd
·в прошлом году·discuss
It's quite ironic they call it enhance security to tie their software to their cloud considering their cloud infrastructure is one of the most hacked of the big corpos. Data breaches happen all the damn time.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04/hackers-could-read-n...

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/01/in-major-gaffe-hack...

Something that doesn't happen much, if at all, with Google or Amazon.

Microsoft is one of the most incompetent and impotent corpo out there and considering how much critical infrastructure relies on their software it would do good for the world if the government intervened like they should have back in the antitrust lawsuit days. Break them up. Separate the cloud, windows and office businesses. Make them stand on their own merits.
avgd
·в прошлом году·discuss
Samsung recently deprecated their built in SMS/texting app and put an advertisement to tell us to switch for Google Messages in their app. They threw in the towel and not only will not maintain an android fork, they don't even want to maintain their own apps anymore.
avgd
·в прошлом году·discuss
I say this as someone who has tried to switch away from google many times because I dislike google as a company : there is no better search engine out there. There hasn't been for as long as google has existed. Every time I make something like bing or yandex my default search engine I end up getting frustrated with a niche search and type google.com and after typing google.com too many times I get fed up and bring it back as default.

And the two competing search engines I mentioned are pretty much all there is. Other names like duckduckgo aren't real search engines, they are just a frontend for another search engine (DDG uses bing). There just isn't many out there willing to front the bill for crawling and indexing the whole web.

People trying to explain away google's success solely from a marketing standpoint are arguing from bad faith.
avgd
·в прошлом году·discuss
> No Email or TOTP? (No, I am not suggesting sms)

Nope. And accessing the website/online banking portal is not allowed without going through the smartphone app 2fa too.
avgd
·в прошлом году·discuss
Many banking apps will outright refuse to run on rooted devices, much less google-free forks. There are ways around that but those ways are unreliable and could break at any given time -- I am not risking losing the ability to pay for things online just for the sake of running an android fork. (in my country, all the banks switched to requiring 2FA from their app if you make online purchases with your visa or mastercard)
avgd
·в прошлом году·discuss
> But there are models trained on legal content (like Wikipedia or StackOverflow)

Literally all of them are trained on wikipedia and SO. But /none/ of them are /only/ trained on wikipedia and SO. They need much more than that.

> Also, no human needs to read millions of pirated books to become intelligent.

Obviously, LLM architectures that were inspired by GPT 2/3 are not learning like humans.

There has never been anything remotely good in the world of LLM that could have been said to have been trained on a moderate, more human scoped amount of data. They're all trained on trillions of tokens.

Models trained on less than 1T are experimental jokes that have no real use to provide.

You'll notice even so called "open data" LLMs like Olmo are, in fact, also trained on copyrighted data, datasets like Common Crawl claim fair use over anything that can be accessed from a web browser.

And then there's the whole notion of laundered data by training on synthetic data generated by another LLM. All the so-called "open" LLMs include a very significant amount of LLM-generated data. If you agree to the notion that LLMs trained on copyrighted work are a form of IP infringement and not fair use, then training on their output is just data laundering and doesn't fix the issue.
avgd
·в прошлом году·discuss
> website that can influence elections in major countries,

I think this sort of power transferred to twitter, with most of the users who haven't left facebook being boomers who keep reposting AI slop over and over and over.

The rare times I look at my facebook account, all I see is the older members of my family spamming AI garbage like shrimp jesus, "look at this nice dog sculpture I made out of wood" (that I didn't actually make), videos of random nonsense like dogs taking care of toddlers and behaving like humans etc.

FB has become AI slop no man's land.

I don't even understand how facebook continues to operate at this point.
avgd
·в прошлом году·discuss
Also, openai only started making deals (and mostly with news publishers) after the NYT lawsuit.

https://www.npr.org/2025/01/14/nx-s1-5258952/new-york-times-...

They didn't even consider doing this before. They still, as far as I know, haven't paid a dime for any book, or art beyond stock photography.

Lawsuit is still ongoing, if openai loses it might spell doom for legal production and usage of LLMs as a whole. There isn't enough open, free data out there to make state of the art AI.
avgd
·в прошлом году·discuss
> Chinese AI companies just flatly ignoring US copyright

It is increasingly tiresome to see this clearly racist bias at work when every US company doing AI has been acting the same way.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

https://piracymonitor.org/chat-gpt-trained-using-pirated-e-b...
avgd
·в прошлом году·discuss
>because that inevitably implies dismantling that trust to get there.

There is nothing to dismantle because it's already gone.

The society that elected Donald Trump on his current program is an exceedingly low trust society. The whole point backed by DOGE is that you can't trust government and must reduce it to the most basic, barebones function. A lot of the current silicon valley elite fell prey to the nonsense preached by people like Curtis Yarvin who preach forms of anarcho-capitalism and despise democracy.

The United States of America are no more.
avgd
·в прошлом году·discuss
Inventory commingling ruined any respect I had for them. They've done that for a long time but I still am beyond pissed by the trend they started of being a front for third party sellers, all French retailers copied them (darty, fnac, cdiscount etc) and searching for products sold by trustworthy entities on the internet is now a nightmare.

Everyone imitates the market leader so it really feels as if competition doesn't exist as an alternative to amazon here. They're all as bad, and sometimes worse.
avgd
·в прошлом году·discuss
> I really hope you’re not thinking about spending less time on-screen.

Your sarcastic tone reminds me of a Steve Jobs interview.

> In 2010, a New York Times reporter had a conversation that revealed a lot about the life of the founder of Apple. Nick Bilton commented, “Your kids must love the iPad, right?” After the launch of the device. Jobs replied, “They haven't used it. We limit the amount of technology our children use at home. "

Yeah, they know what it is that they are doing to the world. And they do not care, profits > humanity.
avgd
·в прошлом году·discuss
It isn't even a specifically nerd thing for terminal tools to be more efficient as a whole. Pharmacies here until very recently used MS DOS based software (probably running on an emulator) to type your data, ordered drugs etc and the efficiency was much greater than your average mouse bumbler. I cringe every time I see a point of sale device with a touchscreen. Absolute abominations.
avgd
·в прошлом году·discuss
Are you seriously asking why Microsoft, the company that has experienced what it means to have power over others (anti competitive practices of the 90s on Windows that led to the United States v. Microsoft Corp. case), should not let Google have total control over what the web should be? should not let Google and Apple be the sole deciders of what should be in the appstore of the most used computing device of the planet?

> Apple Music exists as an ecosystem play

And so? Are you implying MS doesn't need an ecosystem of their own?

MS has. stopped. competing. That's it. That's all. Azure is not a moat, it's highly profitable but it also highly prone for disruption. Office is all they have left.

Man, they don't even need to have as much marketshare as Apple for their presence to be meaningful in the mobile market. They just need enough to be sustainable on their own and keep the competitors "honest".

The more MS transitions to cloud stuff and browser based apps the more they become Google's sharecroppers. It is NOT a good thing for markets to consolidate as much as they have over the past decades.
avgd
·в прошлом году·discuss
> so complex that even Microsoft, the king of this rube goldberg type shit, threw in the towel and said eff it, we’ll just use Chromium

I believe the core reason to be different: Microsoft lost the will to compete.

You can say any number of negative things about Steve Ballmer, but at least the guy tried. He tried. He may fail, but he would try, again and again, no matter how many time he would experience losses.

When he got replaced by a bean counter Microsoft stopped trying. It isn't just browser engines they've abandoned. There is no Windows Phone anymore. Windows 11 is worse on tablets than 10. Closing down their Apple Music competitor (Groove) etc.

Recently, they've been arguing for less exclusivity on gaming consoles and releasing their games on Playstation.

If we anthropomorphized corporations, modern Microsoft is the thin skinned loser who will fold at the slightest provocation.
avgd
·в прошлом году·discuss
If you travel to places unwilling to enforce basic rules of civility you should be willing to suffer additional consequences, rather than having the entirety of Europe continue to suffer because we are unwilling to do the right thing, which is to put an end to the far west of the internet.

Countries unwilling to sign regulations that would have them lock up scammers/DDoS botters and other toxic e-criminal, or unwilling to enforce their own laws when they exist, should not be allowed to continue to pollute the internet at large. Block them until they learn their lesson.

In the west, you can and will lose your access to the internet even if you are not doing this sort of shit on purpose but have an infected computer. See for example : https://it.slashdot.org/story/05/04/13/0320249/major-aussie-...

We enforce the rules on our own citizens, why are we tolerating this level of criminal traffic from China, India, and, the worst of them all, Russia, the country through which we are very much fighting a proxy war right now in funding Ukraine?

We can send missiles to kill russians but we can't cut them from the internet at large ? Really?

Internet access is not a human right. Just like driving on the roads is not a human right and terrible drivers get their license revoked.
avgd
·в прошлом году·discuss
It's the kind of trait you perceive positively when they are applied against people you dislike, and you perceive negatively when they are used against you.
avgd
·в прошлом году·discuss
SwarmUI, a front-end for image generation models, has integrated SAM2 as a quick way to mask parts of an image for things like inpainting. It's wonderful.