Pxtl @ Pxtl @lemmy.ca

- 🌇 #HamOnt,🍁

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2 yr. ago

That's not what I mean. I'm not thinking about Play Store security, but Android OS security. Like, your app physically has to ask for permission (or even require the user manually change settings) to do most unsafe things.

As somebody who occasionally had to develop for android: the churn of improvements to app security was a huge pita. And as a user I know many of the abandoned apps that I liked that lost compatibility was for that reason.

So the fact that in spite of this pain, Android security still allows apps to do horrible crap like that is infuriating.

DevOps is bad because for some reason we've decided to invent new programming languages that you can't debug locally and so you have to keep pushing commits to the pipeline server. It's bullshit.

"Why do you write all your pipelines as shell scripts and then wrap them in yaml at the very end"?

Because then I can run them locally quickly and test individual components of them instead of "edit, commit, push, wait 10 minutes, read error message, repeat".

And I don't make my own paints either when doing art. I still agree with the basic original point:

It is disappointing that we're currently automating creativity far faster than manual labour. I'm angry that my art is getting automated away faster than my folding of laundry.

I mean yeah. I'm not disagreeing with any of that (except the fact that AI caused it - search engines got destroyed by SEO before AI textgen started crapflooding).

But it is what it is. The SEO spammers won. They defeated Google and Microsoft and DDG's respective search algorithms. Traditional search got killed. The internet got worse instead of better.

In light of this miserable new reality, AI-based content synthesizers (particularly ones that can coherently point to the references for their synthesis) are the current solution to SEO spam. Maybe this is another temporary plateau that the SEO spammers will murder. And yes, it's tragic that this energy-pig of AI is the best solution to something that used to be doable with a simple trie.

But still: there is a real problem today for which an AI-based tech provides the current best solution. In this one specific case, the AI lives up to the hype. It swallows the hellscape of noise of the internet and gives you the signal.

Bing Chat provides its sources.

Okay but I still have to fold my own laundry.

Absolutely.

Bing Chat Assistant is better than Google, Bing search, or DDG today. If I search for "how do I do X in software Y" on a normal search, I get zillions of dead-link-filled MS pages, some interesting tangentially-related stackoverflow posts, and a bunch of old blogspam.

If I ask the robot, I often get "no, there's no supported way to do that officially" which is the clear clean answer I can't find elsewhere. Or sometimes it misunderstands the question and gives me a tangentially-related result, which is bad but is the same thing I get from Google via StackOverflow, except Bing is much more responsive to me saying "no, I didn't mean that way, I meant this" in which case I often get either the right answer or the "no" answer, which is still good and accurate! The problem is as you iterate, the conversation accumulates cruft and becomes more erratic and hallucinatory.

But right now, with the level of SEO that has ruined all major search engines (ironically partially caused by AI), Bing Chat is the best search on the market now imho.

<homer>

</homer>

So yeah, in terms of "things where AI has lived up to its potential"? It is winning the search war today. Everything else is something on the horizon in various distances (art, music, text generation, true general AI) but better search for information is here right now.

I wish they could come up with a more honest term for it than "vegan leather". Call it "upholstery vinyl" or something. Frustrating how there's no good standard quality grades for that stuff too. Like, the seats in my Prius don't wear the way my belt and my boots do, and they're all made of pleather vinyl.

Glass backs are the dumbest idea in the history of stupid.

The only way things like that could be defensible if they were easy to replace (bring back Moto-Z style magnetic backs!), but since phones are all held together with glue now, that's not a thing.

Except there isn't much of a Google stealing their thunder. Bing isn't better. DDG isn't better.

I have a simple opinion on paywall bypassers:

If it's possible to bypass the paywall, that means there's already a class of unauthenticated clients you're allowing to see it. I have no interest in complying with whatever infrastructure you use to implement this discrimination.

Implementing a true hard paywall is trivial software. The only reason bypassing is possible is because they're trying to have their cake and eat it too by allowing (eg) search engines to see it unauthenticated.

The PM should make more than the people who run crown corporations. 80 of Canadians are wrong.

I have a gwatch 4 and the hardware is fine. The flaw is Google's half-assed android fork WearOS, and then the layer of Samsung software that somehow makes it worse.

You could have infinite memory and processor in there and it wouldn't solve the jank.

I dunno, these extreme tall phones are a pain to type on. Keyboard usability seems to be defined by the squareness of the phone.

Thanks, municipalities, by trying to persevere the character of your neighbourhoods, you've managed to destroy the character of Canada.

People are upset about immigrants because of housing. Housing is a problem because cities made it de jure illegal.

Yeah, this. For people with short commutes and in the market for a compact I strongly recommend the Prius Prime. Having a vehicle that can get to work and back without using gas at all, but also can go on long road trips without range anxiety? Perfect. And as an entry-level into the plug-in world, it's nice that I can charge it on regular 110 instead of having to think about an upgrade to an oven-port.

So, do you have to have an account to drive a Tesla?

Oh, physical tag. I thought this was going to be about cryptographic data signing.