Skip Navigation

User banner
Posts
2
Comments
552
Joined
1 yr. ago

  • Qalculate is a fancy calculator available for Linux, MacOS and Windows. I use it for calculations that involve unit conversions, but it can do much more.

  • Mudita Kompakt

    Jump
  • Recently, I watched a YouTube video about phones designed to minimize distractions. While they aim to solve the problem of smartphone overuse, their utility in today's world is questionable. Essential tasks like using banking apps, navigation, communication, and parking apps often require a smartphone, making these distraction-free phones less practical.

    The video mentioned some "smart" distraction-free phones, but if you need those features, why not just adjust the settings on your regular smartphone to achieve a similar minimalist setup? Ultimately, traditional dumb phones seem too limited for modern needs, while the smarter minimalist phones are essentially just smartphones with minimalist settings. It's hard to see who the target audience for these phones really is.

  • All of this spying and data hoarding has resulted in a finely tuned advertising machine that directs car ads to people who specifically hate cars with a burning passion. Peak of targeted advertising.👌

    And people still wonder why I use every means within my disposal to block ads. Even if I allowed ads, they aren’t targeted enough to be much more than an annoyance. Even when they somehow manage to show me something I care about, I’m seeing an interesting product from the highest paying company. It’s not the best product in that category, nor is the one that would serve me best. It’s the one from the company that was willing to pay more than any other. Advertising is just so broken in every way you can think of.

  • Oh, so consumers stop consuming, retail companies fire employees to maintain profitability, etc. Few rounds of that and you have even more poor people who can be exploited to maintain the wealth inequality or even widen the gap. Was that the idea?

  • What about all of the Trump’s billionaire buddies who depend on the general public spending money on stuff? This can’t be good for business, now can it? If this is some sort of clever tactic that results in them getting more money in the end, please tell me how that works.

  • Only if the value goes so far below zero that you get an integer overflow.

  • It won’t disappear, but the version number will be frozen. I kinda prefer to have security updates on a regular basis.

  • That’s an impressive amount of optimism you have there. My guess is, you can kiss that money goodbye, but I hope everything somehow works out anyway.

  • Have you considered resorting to a hard stare? I mean, it works every time in the Paddington movies.

  • Masked ICE Gestapo raiding a …

    The wording in these articles is getting spicier every day.

  • Is America trying to replicate the Arab spring? If so, the next steps can get very messy. Just look what happened in Syria.

  • Food additives. People are afraid of scary chemical names, but hiding them behind numbers doesn’t really help much. It just makes the ingredient list shorter.

  • Those who need to know the pH value, might be a small minority, just like people with specific allergies. The size of the group doesn’t seem to be a deciding factor in these things. As long as the information benefits someone, it makes sense to include it.

    On the other hand, delusional and paranoid people will always find a way to make stupid decisions. They are already using e-codes for that purpose, so I think we can just ignore them in this case.

  • You could also fall out of a window, or mysteriously disappear in the middle of the night. There are options you know.

  • You could look at it from the perspective of the moral foundations.

    • Care/harm✅
    • Fairness/cheating✅
    • Loyalty?/betrayal?
    • Authority?/subversion?
    • Sanctity?/degradation?
    • Liberty/oppression✅

    Only about half of these are clear to me. I think Trump needs to step up his game if he wants to get to the worst outcome possible.

  • Wow, those are some pretty big numbers! About 10x bigger than what I was thinking. I knew these things can get pretty weird, but this is just absolutely wild. When expectations fly that high, the crash can be all the more spectacular.

    When you notice that your free account can’t do much, that’s a sign that OpenAI is beginning to run out of money. When that happens, the competitors will be ready to welcome all the users who didn’t feel like paying OpenAI.

  • That's a very good point. Actually, video hosting services also suffer from a similar problem, and that's one of the main reasons why it's so hard to compete with YouTube. Since there are so many LLM services out there at the moment, it makes me think that there must be a completely ridiculous amount of investor money floating around there. Doesn't sound like a sustainable situation to me.

    Apparently, the companies are hoping that everyone gets so hooked on LLMs that they have no choice but to pay up when the inevitable tsunami of enshittification hits us.

  • As long as they can convince investors of potential future revenue, they will be just fine. In the growth stage, companies don’t have to be profitable because the investors will cover the expenses. Being profitable becomes a high priority only when you run out of series F money, and the next investors can’t borrow another 700 million. It’s a combination of having low interest rates and convincing arguments.

    BTW I don’t think this is a good way to run a company, but many founders and investors clearly disagree with me.