I’m not against ads in principle. The advertisers are paying the bill for stuff I consume. Great.
For that effort, they get a chance at my wallet. And to be honest, making me aware of a business or product is indeed a way to get me interested in what they sell. I do prefer the ads to be relevant instead of always useless.
That being said, it’s currently preferable to use a blocker and let the people who don’t know how to use blockers subsidize my ad-free ways.
I was at the Canton Fair last week which is a trade show in China where manufacturers display some of their latest technology.
There was a robotics display all where they are showing off how lots of factories, kitchens, another labor-based jobs can be automated with technology.
This doesn’t really have a lot to do with AI or LLMs, but the field of robotics is advancing fast and a lot of basic work that humans had to do in the past won’t be needed as much in the future.
If your argument attacks my credibility, that’s fine, you don’t know me. We can find cases where developers use the technology and cases where they refuse.
Do you have anything substantive to add to the discussion about whether AI LLMs are anything more than just a tool that allows workers to further abstract, advancing all of the professions it can touch towards any of: better / faster / cheaper / easier?
I think your strategy makes sense for all workers. Being aware of your role in the final solution is more important than the steps needed to get there, and tools merely change the process, often improving it in some way.
A guy with a hammer cant automatically build a house without skills, but it sure helps those who have them. A guy with a nail gun can build a house faster and perhaps with less skill, and few argue that it’s not a worthy improvement.
Some types of photographers may no longer need to operate a camera, but instead transition into someone who can knowledgeably ask for the results from an AI that properly captures the mood and tone required for the end result.
We’re changing how it’s done, but not necessarily what is done.
Beholden to the AAPL ticker.
I’m not really an expert on Android but isn’t it available in open source?
I’m curious why we don’t see more open source phone hardware and a fork of Android that doesn’t have egregious centralization. FOSS ideology has solved this in many areas.
Is the core issue that banking apps won’t run without signing or in a “secure environment”? And Google’s apps won’t run without play / Google services?
Eek, I’m moving towards nextcloud (and away from Google fast as possible). Is there a better all-in-one groupware + files + collab + office apps suite out there?
It does appear that nextcloud’s devs are eyeballs deep in php tech debt, so their pace of development and integration has slowed.
It’s so big that none of their FOSS components are going to be #1 on their own.
Recently upgraded the version and had to allow untested app versions (which had just disappeared) because they hadn’t been updated yet. That’s a weird problem and yeah, I don’t really want to be beta tester everytime I try and open a document.
They also don’t really have a nice docker compose based deployment yet.
But I couldn’t be happier to be leaving google in the dust, so there’s that.
So do advertisers still have to pay for impressions or clicks if the viewer isn’t logged in?
Something tells me Google’s just going to pocket the difference now.
I’ve been self-hosting since the '90s. I used to have an NT 3.51 server in my house. I had a dial in BBS that worked because of an extensive collection of .bat files that would echo AT commands to my COM ports to reset the modems between calls. I remember when we had to compile the slackware kernel from source to get peripherals to work.
But in this last year I took the time to seriously learn docker/podman, and now I’m never going back to running stuff directly on the host OS.
I love it because I can deploy instantly… Oftentimes in a single command line. Docker compose allows for quickly nuking and rebuilding, oftentimes saving your entire config to one or two files.
And if you need to slap in a traefik, or a postgres, or some other service into your group of containers, now it can be done in seconds completely abstracted from any kind of local dependencies. Even more useful, if you need to move them from one VPS to another, or upgrade/downgrade core hardware, it’s now a process that takes minutes. Absolutely beautiful.
15 years is too long, it doesn’t match the state of the industry or technological progress.
If anything this slows down innovation which leads me to suspect the 15 year idea was though of by someone who dislikes any technical changes.
On the other hand, have you ever seen a government authored operating system?
Thanks for posting this take. The topic of AI taking jobs seems to garner a lot of emotional response but not much of a technology discussion.
There were people who were negative about using websites to place orders in the 90s in part because e-commerce killed order processing jobs and the need for phone reps at mail order catalogs.
In this case AI is being used as just another e-commerce UX, so it’s really just a continuation of what’s happening already.
People used to do things like put 18,000, or -1 and all kinds of other garbage in the fields on website order forms as well. That’s just a programmers job to fix with reasonable input validation.
It wouldn’t surprise me if drive-thru like Taco Bell started doing license plate recognition and reputation checking. So if you order and dash more than a couple times they might not take your order from outside in that car anymore.
On the upside they might be able to greet you by name and recall your last order:
Hello Mr Smith… Nice to see you today, would you like 10 cheesy gordita crunch tacos and 1 large diet Pepsi again?
A more sophisticated query system would be interesting.
For example if I want to see every picture with Joseph in it, that’s really easy. But what if I’d like to share those with Joseph along with the albums he’s in?
Similar to that would be a query by location and person. Or a query that includes two people.
Their policies, verification systems, KYC/AML processes, risk aversion, and customer support leave many PayPal users with unmet expectations, especially when there is an issue with the transaction and PayPal is asked to assist.
The company has found ways to avoid some of the regulations that banks are held to which is partly the reason for the issues.
If you search the web for PayPal experiences, you’ll find concerns such as their 1.3 star rating with almost 35,000 reviews on Trustpilot.
Does quicken still sync well with most American banks, investment accounts, and credit card companies?
I used to be a power user as well but then moved overseas where is syncs with nothing.
Now I use gnucash with a ton of custom python scraping and importing scripts. It isn’t perfect but as close as I have been able to find.
I was traveling internationally recently and returning to the USA I didn’t even need my passport to clear through immigration. They had a camera which recognized me and gave me the green light to pass as I approached.
The agent had a few questions and I was on my way.
It was convenient as hell, but the fact that their system can link me to whatever data is stored with my passport records based on a second or two of recognition out of all the faces that must be in there…
actually kinda blows.
It means they can definitely put a street camera system in place and see oh, there’s /u/nucleative. Wonder why he’s at the protest, bank, with that person, driving that car, near a crime scene, or anything else.
Somehow we have zero privacy yet the enforcement hides behind numbers and masks.
I expect that this will just continue to go further and further.
Kids, this is why we needed to push back hard on privacy, random cameras, and facial recognition 20 years ago.
The metaphorical horse is already out of the barn and removing or disabling these systems will probably never happen now.
Are there any resources that compile a good counter-argument to this?
On the one hand we seem to currently have some of the cheapest air tickets the world has ever seen. If you’re willing to travel like cattle.
On the other hand it feels like air travel is now like getting on the city bus and there’s some guy vomiting in front of you and a screaming kid pissing on the seat behind you, all the while you’re getting herded around like a cow, your stuff is at high risk of getting stolen with no recourse, and the airline is playing mind games about the best time to buy a ticket after sneaking in a bunch of clauses designed to get you to pay more later.
Couldn’t have a thought further from his mind
A lot of FOSS projects are freemium based which seems viable for larger more complex projects.
In these projects it’s common to see the developer get paid for adding features on top of the core version, for a SaaS version, for custom development, or for offering support.
Other projects with a lot of community interest - and a good “community manager” style organizer can attract contributors in the form of pulls, bug testing and reports, and widespread use which generates valuable marketing. These projects only exist because of the labor of love from the whole community.