isaacd @ isaaclyman @lemmy.world

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5

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49

Joined

1 yr. ago

Pronounced REE-poe-SOH-tuh-ree

The article does not mention paraplegia.

I think we all know where this is going.

1. The Brainchip is trendy in Silicon Valley but doesn’t do much yet. The company says cyber-superintelligence will be available in a year, tops. Investors are pouring billions into it. Everyone says you need to hop on the trend now or you’ll be obsolete in six months.
2. It’s been two years. The Brainchip still struggles to control a mouse or search Google. Everyone’s lost interest in building apps for it. Many users are reporting severe migraines, but the company says there’s nothing to worry about.
3. The Brainchip pipes three unskippable ads directly to your optic nerve every time you go to the bathroom. Notifications ping your brain all day long. You can get it removed if you’ve got $80k to burn, but there’s a high risk of postoperative stroke.

Yeah, no, I’m not putting anything in my brain that isn’t open-source from end to end. And even then probably nah.

I used to waste a lot of time on YouTube Shorts, which is the absolute worst way to waste time. I finally deleted the YouTube app completely, and aside from a couple days of withdrawals, it’s been all positive.

I mean, I don’t know anything about the latest video games or movies anymore. And I have to rely on my family to send me Ryan George skits. But that stuff wasn’t actually making my life better, it was just filling it up.

If I want to watch something interesting on my phone, I’ve got Nebula. It doesn’t have all the same content, but it turns out that doesn’t matter a lot when you just want to be entertained/educated for a couple minutes. (It also doesn’t have a comment section. Or Shorts. So yeah, unequivocally better.)

“Online communities” are great, but how do you stop them from being infiltrated by corporate astroturfers within five minutes of creation? Doesn’t every major brand have a low-overhead keyboard farm posting social media and forum comments to make them look good?

I’m anti-advertising, but this simply isn’t true. Customers don’t show up out of thin air. They don’t care. Anyone who’s built or created anything knows that feeling invisible is the rule, not the exception.

A lot of us here on Lemmy are part of the software industry. Have you ever tried to make money by building a great app and waiting for users to trickle in? It doesn’t work. You might as well declare bankruptcy before you start. Selling anything at all, let alone software, is like pulling teeth—and software is more often a luxury than a necessity, making it even harder.

(Granted, advertising has made the situation worse by training people to ignore any and all attempts to get their attention or communicate information.)

Approximately every successful software business has talented and hardworking salespeople behind the scenes. I’ve learned this the hard way: you need sales experts or you won’t sell a damn thing.

Maybe someday we can find a way to get by without ads. But let’s not pretend it’s as easy as “if you build it, they will come.”

As a professional dev (okay, okay, forgot where I was, aren’t we all) I approve of this reasoning

For anyone on the “invest in the complete opposite of whatever Don Jr. is doing” plan, there are lots of good ESG’s you can put your money in. Firms like Calvert are gonna perform slightly worse than VTSAX, but it’s typically not more than “slightly,” and at least your money isn’t funding oil cartels, Meta, Amazon et al.

The Microsoft store app that nobody uses? Oh god, anything but that

It’s all hallucinations. It’s just that some of them happen to be right

Or!—hear me out—one woman whose 8 co-gestators were just laid off by someone who doesn’t understand what their job was

There’s a handful of us that do 50 for FOSS: https://50forfoss.org/

tl;dr: on the first Friday of the month we each pick a FOSS (free/open-source) project and give the maintainer $50.

Thanks and encouragement is great too. As a small-time open source maintainer, it seems awareness has been spreading over the last few years and people are going out of their way to be kind and respectful when they raise issues; it really makes a difference. But financial sustainability and community ownership are separate and arguably more essential issues if we want FOSS to survive over the long term.

I did have one maintainer turn down the $50 and ask me to donate it to UNICEF. It’s all the same to me as long as it makes the work more sustainable for them.

“If we run terabytes of text through a statistical model, then spend millions of man-hours labeling outputs, we can approximate the way humans respond to a prompt.” –OpenAI, more or less

Wow, what a surprise. I'll do you one better: if you take me to a river, I can tell you where the water is going to go next! Maybe we can get some VC money by promising to deliver clean water to every business in the world without all the expense of pipelines and plumbers? I mean, just look at all this water. It may not go where you want right now, but let us dump sewage in it for a couple years and who knows what it’ll do.

This is why email never caught on. Who wants to choose between Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, Proton, and Comcast? A successful email service would be one where you can only communicate with users of the same email service. /s

As this thread demonstrates, there are plenty of ways to say “I’m doing terrible, actually” without breaking the social contract. If I’m having an awful day, my go-to is “hangin’ in there, how are you?”

The last part is important. Some people don’t want to talk about how you’re doing (maybe they don’t have the emotional bandwidth at the moment, maybe they’re in a hurry, maybe they just don’t care) so give them an out, a clear signal of something else they can discuss without seeming rude. The easiest way is to return the question, but you can also just jump into the imminent topic of conversation, like:

“How are you?”

“Keeping on keeping on. Hey, just wanted to reach out about that thing on page 4, do you have a minute?”

Or if they started the conversation and you don’t know what it’s about, there’s always “Takin’ it one day at a time, eh? What can I do for you?”

The biggest “risk” of this approach is that someone may offer sympathy or ask you what happened, which is a whole new set of protocols. But for me it’s worth it to not have to lie.

Kavita for my ebook collection—mostly tabletop RPGs, but some comics and sci fi as well.

I don’t actually use the web interface that often. I add books to my Kavita library, then scan the OPDS feed into my scratch-my-own-itch mobile app, Bookoscope, and download whatever I want to read onto my tablet from there.

Side note, PDFs are the absolute worst. Even reading them on a full-sized tablet is incredibly annoying. Anybody have any tips/tricks/apps for that?

Mosquito baiting

Ugh, I don’t know about you but the amount of work I put into being a “good exmormon” and not playing into all the stereotypes and stories they tell about us, if only for the sake of proving them wrong, is ridiculous.

I left Mormonism in 2020. Took me a while to fully extricate myself, but coffee was right at the top of my to-do list. My whole life I’ve slowed down while passing the coffee aisle so I can take a whiff.

I think my first drink was a latte from a local chain, no sugar. There wasn’t any “acquired taste” period, I dug it from the first sip. And that was that.

I don’t like any sweetness in my coffee at all. When I make it at home I take it black. I drink decaf, usually, because caffeine is a troublesome molecule for me. There’s a shop not far from here that makes an incredible cup of decaf—smooth, mild, neither sour nor bitter.

Thanks for the tip about decaf beans being mechanically different from regular beans. For some reason, after years of watching James Hoffmann videos, that never occurred to me. I’ve been gradually dialing in my brewing process and taking that into account might be the next step.