Well, that part at least I don’t think is necessary. It’s a parody of a dating app, and it seems from searching screenshots the real app doesn’t have units either - just the number.

Which is just fine, because the number next to someone’s name being their age is clear from context.

I suspect the person you responded to understood the context, but was cheekily calling out the “technically incorrect” usage of ±

The ± symbol requires a tolerance value to create a defined maximum and minimum range, e.g 300±20 (so Soran could be anything between 280 and 320)

it doesn’t mean “approximately”

But I understand this is just an inconsequential funny picture, so whatever right.

And after the apocalypse is finished there’s probably gonna be Iike, jobs available, and plenty of empty real estate. Opportunities!

Viewers have literally zero attention span, so if the talking isn’t super high speed back to back without even a single second to pause for breath, people click off or scroll past.

Same with subtitles that flash up rapidly, a single word at at time.

That’s the sorry state of affairs we are now living with.

Things change.

Ten years ago I joined a newly formed small company. They were all-in on the google suite for everything, and it was great. Gmail, docs, meet, all joined up really well and fully cloud so everyone could work just as easily from home as in the office, with no on-prem hardware or VPNs or anything. It made the work so productive.

But of course enshittification happens, corps get evil, and everything goes down the toilet.

These days I am degoogling as much as possible and would never choose g-suite again, either personally or for business, but 10 years ago for that small business it was a godsend.

Put hummus in your sandwiches or something, it’s a great condiment.

The coffee story is quite a long way in, but it was an interesting read, thanks.

I guess the message is, things aren’t always good because they are objectively good. Sometimes things are good because of when we had them, and who we enjoyed them with. And that’s definitely true.

I’m two ways about this.

In recent years I’ve become quite a coffee lover. I’ve experimented with a lot of brewing methods, and got into small batch beans from independent roasters, with interesting qualities like being aged in whisky barrels (that one tastes and smells sooo good)

At the same time though I grew up in a family where the only coffee my parents ever drank was instant - a teaspoon of granules with some hot water and milk and maybe sugar. When I go over there to visit that’s what I’ll get, and I’m not going to turn my nose up at it. In some ways it’s got that taste of nostalgia lol.

“All publicity is good publicity” , maybe…

Sorry yes, that’s what I meant really. They could be straight. My poor description.

I heard this in the Worms voice.

Two of the lines having elbow bends in them when they could just be single right-angles makes me unreasonably upset

With TV there were only so many channels, but with Internet distribution the limits have been blown away on how many shows can be produced and available at once. There’s more content now than ever before, and the way people consume that content has changed, too.

Streaming incentivises a model where new content is pushed at you constantly to keep you watching and “engaged” (because engagement = ads = money) and so the most important metric is quantity of shows, not quality.

I’ve watched shows I enjoyed that six months later I couldn’t even tell you the name of, because it’s a once-and-done watch, and then I’m onto the next thing.

With such high volumes of new content there’s no opportunity to get bored anymore, and that has consequences for how much old content gets revisited.

In the 2000s we’d all have some series or other on DVD, and when there was nothing good on TV that night we’d go back and re-watch it. And that re-watch process built up both your own personal fondness for the show, and the staying power of that show in the shared cultural consciousness. Plus you could probably speak with your friends about shows because chances were pretty good they’d seen it too, which only boosts it more.

When we’re all just watching things once and never again, and often not even the same things as each other, there’s no staying power.

I also believe - my personal opinion - that this quantity problem is why right now there are SO MANY remakes, reboots, spin-offs, and live-action versions of existing movies. Even the big players are finding it very hard to launch new things that reach the audience they want because the market is so absolutely saturated with “content”. And so they have to fall back on franchises that are already recognised and popular across a wide cultural gamut, things that cemented their popularity at a time before the quantity problem really set in.

It’s strange times.

Half the reason I like sci-fi so much is that it’s the genre which most often avoids pointless interpersonal drama.

I like to watch shows that are about things happening and how the characters deal with those things, not just jealous relationship fighting and people who can’t even decide whose side they’re on.

Don’t get me wrong - character conflict is necessary for any good show, regardless of the genre, but I don’t want the entire show to be that.

For me it’s the privacy angle that matters.

All these restaurant apps being pushed like “it’s cheaper on the app!” and “you can get a free side on the app!”

And I’m almost tempted to install it, but then I remember by doing so I’m giving the company a wealth of data to slurp on me, letting them bombard me with notifications, and giving their logo a shining advertisement spot in my app drawer so every time I’m hungry I see it, and want it.

When I think about the higher non-app price in those terms, as a “privacy tax” to keep my data and my dignity, then I’m happy to pay it.

Ah. I suppose it’s just down to how my client chooses to handle it, then :)

The thumbnail animates!

I guess the ‘trick’ to doing that is to upload an image sufficiently small in resolution and filesize where the instance doesn’t bother trying to scale it down, and uses the original image as the thumb directly.

They both use copyrighted material yes (and I agree that is bad) but let’s work this argument through.

Before we get into this, I’d like to say I personally think AI is an absolute hell on earth which is causing tremendous societal damage. I wish we could un-invent AI and pretend it never happened, and the world would be better for that. But my personal views on AI are not going to factor into this argument.

I feel the argument here, and a view shared by many, is that since the AI was trained unethically, on copyrighted material, then any manner in which that AI is used is equally unethical.

My argument would be that the origin of a tool - be that ethical or unethical, good or evil - does not itself preclude judgment on the individuals later using that tool, for how they choose to use it.

When you ask an AI to generate an image, unless you specify otherwise it will create an amalgam based on its entire training set. The output image, even though it will be derived from work of many artists and photographers, will not by default be directly recognisable as the work of any single person.

When you use an AI to clone someone’s voice on the other hand, that doesn’t even depend on data held within the model, but is done through you yourself feeding in a bunch of samples as inputs for the model to copy and directing the AI to impersonate that individual directly.

As an end user we don’t have any control over how the model was trained, but what we can choose is how that model is used, and to me, that makes a lot of difference.

We can use the tool to generate general things without impersonating anyone in particular, or we can use it to directly target and impersonate specific artists or individuals.

There’s certainly plenty of hypocrisy in a person using stolen copyright to generate images, while at the same time complaining of someone doing the same to their voice, but our carthartic schadenfreude at saying “fuck you, you got what’s coming” shouldn’t mean we don’t look objectively at these two activities in terms of their impact.

Fundamentally, generating a generic image versus cloning someone’s voice are tremendously different in scope, the directness of who they target, and the level of infringement and harm caused. And so although nobody is innocent here, one activity is still far worse morally than the other - and by a very large amount.

I’d suggest not moving towards even more consolidation on the biggest instance. It rather defeats the point of decentralisation.

I myself am a lemm.ee refugee (just registered this new account today) and I specifically ruled world out because it benefits the health of Lemmy more to spread users and communities around.