Yeah, the person above isn’t being accurate at all.

While here in the UK we rely heavily on the US for control of Trident, the US dropping NATO support would just require additional defence spending and closer alignment with Europe. If Trump is bought by Russia, Putin would see this as a Very Bad Thing, and would want to keep the US in the fold because even with the US NATO would likely steamroll Russia.

The Trump dynamic is somewhat problematic, should it fester elsewhere in Europe. Globalisation was an important trait to maintain for the US, whereas most populist movements move towards buying local or supporting national interests above all else. Europe is largely self-sufficient, even in defence, so Trump would probably cut off huge numbers of imports/exports just to prop up Elon’s shitty cars.

I say this as someone in big tech, AI is pushed because it’s an easy lie to keep big companies viewed as innovating to shareholders. I say this knowing that Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon have contributed significantly to AI research in the last few years alongside the obvious contributions of OpenAI - the goal isn’t groundbreaking AI work, but to act as a smoke-screen to show that nothing else has been delivered.

Google has lost ground in advertising, and is losing customers on many of their services. Amazon is losing ground in cloud computing and in retail. Apple has stagnated with recent poor releases. Microsoft has made ground in cloud, but has struggled in advertising, Xbox, Office, and Windows. They use GenAI to keep their stock price high, otherwise they’d drop like a sack of shit because shareholders would say “what the fuck have you even done in the last half a decade?”

I imagine a lot of it is to remove current stock, and because the UK has several tobacco companies that moved into vapes, and also employ hundreds

Gigs and concerts are pretty grim for this now too.

The problem with these fundamental rulings is that they’re largely trying to fit square objects through round holes. When a simple ruling is made to essentially say “to current law, no”, the law itself ultimately becomes meaningless, because older games couldn’t be easier to pirate. Most of them are smaller than a TikTok video, and are so cheap/easy to host that you’ll never stop them from being shared. Hell, emulation has come so far that you can effectively emulate these games on a browser, on multiple devices, even devices that don’t natively support gaming.

The smart thing to do would be to say that maybe the legal framework that embodies retro gaming needs to be researched and heavily considered. It’s a hard task that’ll require many lawyers, many fights, and lots of lobbying to ensure the word of law is worth something. Sadly, it’s easier to say “lol no” and to essentially just promote piracy.

Why should a user care about the health of an online community? To them it should “just work”.

(I’m being purposely facetious here, because the average person really doesn’t care about this shit. When Twitter no longer serves its purpose to them they just leave and go to the next place)

But again, what tangible benefit does that have for the average user? They don’t give a fuck about billionaire ownership, moderation, or where an “instance” or server is located.

While true, how is that any different to the arguments that were used for TV? Additionally, Lemmy is a social network in the same way that Reddit is. Is this not also dangerous?

As has been the recommendation for practically everything for the four decades I’ve been on this earth, moderation is key. Instead of hating new media, either regulate it (if the evidence is truly that great) or treat it with healthy moderation.

Let’s be blunt here. Most of the people in this thread aren’t worried about health. They don’t like short-form video/foreign-owned companies/things they didn’t grow up with, and their elitism is getting the better of them instead of them letting people like what they want to like.

That’s…actually a really good use case for something like this. I’d argue that a recommendation algorithm that tailors to the best content a given federated service can provide for their use-case is probably a better source than what you’d get from a single source of truth that could give you everything and nothing.

All true, but what explicit problem do they solve for the average user?

ITT: People in their mid-twenties or later, who feel superior to those that like one form of media over their preferred media.

Elitism aside, I don’t really see what federation solves here. What benefits does federation offer the user? How does the recommendation algorithm give users what they want? How will a decentralised platform perform the kind of centralised events a platform like TikTok is known for?

I’m from Bristol! This pub is called the Bag Of Nails, and while some people aren’t fans (the place naturally smells of cats and you’re not getting food there) I love going there for a drink and to spend time with some friendly cats. It’s always fairly busy, and is a nice talking point when I head for a beer with people that aren’t from the area.

Many moons ago I worked briefly on an ad prototype that aimed to replace banner ads, particularly those that sit in content with a single bottom overlay that would “smartly” unobstruct the viewing experience of the page. I was able to reduce a full page of horrible ads into a single box at the bottom of the page that could be closed whenever.

The idea fell completely flat for various reasons, but some off the top of my head:

• We have x advertisers that NEED to be on this page - how can we possibly get x on the page with just one box?
• I don’t care if people use ad blockers, let them do their thing and we’ll target those that are happy to see ads
• If people can easily close them, the reflex to close will mean no ad is glanced.

The sad stat that came out was that obtrusive ads, the kind that used popups or automatically opened apps to download were VERY effective. I could prove that my ads were several times more effective than “normal” banner ads and popups, but when you could sell 10x the ads it didn’t matter if they were 10x more effective.

My brief stint in advertising made me feel that for many years people didn’t care about those that blocked ads because there was always more shit to optimise or grow into. That has stagnated, so now the likes of Google are targeting “market share” by getting those that block ads to look at ads again. It won’t work, at all, but it feels like they’ve now optimised themselves into a hole.

This is Lemmy, though. We’re not the normal crowd, not even the normal tech crowd. We’re the “Hacker News in '07 that laughed at Dropbox because you could just use curlftpfs and source control” crowd. As a general rule, if it’s not about Linux or Star Trek lore this place knows nothing.

Why does anyone still give a fuck what DHH has to say any more?

Rails is a ghetto has been a thing for over a decade, and the man is basically just a tech contrarian at this point.

I say this as someone that works in AI.

It’s all a smoke-screen. It shows that Google (and every other big tech company) is producing super secret, super high tech stuff that should make their shareholders super happy. The reality is that Google and co haven’t produced shit for years, have laid off hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, and don’t have long term plans to improve outside of enshittifcation.

“sigh”

(Preface: I work in AI)

This isn’t news. We’ve known this for many, many years. It’s one of the reasons why many companies didn’t bother using LLM’s in the first place, that paired with the sheer amount of hallucinations you’ll get that’ll often utterly destroy a company’s reputation (lol Google).

With that said, for commercial services that use LLM’s, it’s absolutely not true. The models won’t reason, but many will have separate expert agents or API endpoints that it will be told to use to disambiguate or better understand what is being asked, what context is needed, etc.

It’s kinda funny, because many AI bros rave about how LLM’s are getting super powerful, when in reality the real improvements we’re seeing is in smaller models that teach a LLM about things like Personas, where to seek expert opinion, what a user “might” mean if they misspell something or ask for something out of context, etc. The LLM’s themselves are only slightly getting better, but the thing that preceded them is propping them up to make them better

IMO, LLM’s are what they are, a good way to spit information out fast. They’re an orchestration mechanism at best. When you think about them this way, every improvement we see tends to make a lot of sense. The article is kinda true, but not in the way they want it to be.

While it is an uplifting game that I highly recommend, probably don’t play Spiritfarer if you have anxiety around death or dying…

Obviously, Chrono Trigger is an all-time classic with some good endings and character building. I’d recommend that too.

Perhaps RDR2 is a good idea also? You’re a part of a gang, so you’re always near or close to a camp where there are people to interact with.

The man can’t release an affordable electric car, despite it being on his roadmap for over a decade. Cunt isn’t releasing an affordable taxi lol

Not quite. .NET is owned by the .NET Foundation, and while it’s heavily influenced by Microsoft, it’s an independent entity. C# is owned by Microsoft, but frankly they’ve put together what was even then far more advanced than anything Java could do even now.

To be blunt, back in the 2000’s it was this exact mentality that pushed me towards C#. Instead of people bitching and starting holy wars about Java, Ruby, and other languages, the .NET community just quietly got on with things and built some fantastic tooling. Furthermore, it was one of the communities that helped me go from hapless junior to someone able to give technical talks on what I had learned, or even speak to giants in the industry like Jon Skeet.