planish @ planish @sh.itjust.works

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Joined

2 yr. ago

The death of the device and the return of the system.

A device is a sealed thing provided on a take it or leave it basis, often designed to oppose the interests of the person using it. Like hybrid corn, a device is infertile by design: you cannot use a device to develop, test, and program more devices.

A system is a curated collection of interchangeable hardware and software parts. Some parts are only compatible with certain other parts, but there is no part that cannot be replaced with an alternative from a different manufacturer. Like heirloom seeds, systems are fertile: systems can be used to design and program both other systems and devices.

A system is a liberatory technology for manipulating information, while a device is a carceral technology for manipulating people.

It's really useful for distributing podcasts.

You could also use it to follow things, if you want to follow them. People often cross-post to social platforms when they publish a new thing, but if you don't want to try and agree on a platform (or on ActivityPub) with everything you want to follow, you can use RSS.

And it doesn't cause other problems like outsmarting the brain systems that are supposed to be attaching your intelligence to the interests of your body? Or the people inconveniently stopping you from snorting cocaine constantly until you die? And there's no level of intelligence you reach where you note that higher levels are unlikely to be any more use to you in achieving your actual goals, versus spending that button-pushing time on other tasks? And all this intelligence is free and doesn't require any energy input to run in your head? And at some level you become intelligent enough to impart these abilities to your descendants or to just never die? And you reach a level of intelligence where you can fight off the CIA before you reach a level of intelligence where you interest the CIA?

People don't generally reason about things like "intelligence" as an abstract value from zero to infinity, because we don't encounter such things very often. What we do encounter is people trying to scam us. If you present someone with something that appears to be a 100% obvious perfect move with absolutely no drawbacks whatsoever, they mostly correctly conclude that they just aren't smart enough to understand the catch.

You probably want to run the command as nobody, the special system user who daemons become when they don't want to have root permissions.

Are you sure? One can definitely build images of the actual "Android TV" for various SBCs and the sorts of SOCs in these TV boxes, and then load them up with malware. Why wouldn't they use that?

• A lot of people do not actually understand the tool, they think there is a rational computer in there with a more or less hand-crafted world model and its own live access to the Internet and maybe the phone system. So training it to say "As a large language model, I cannot order you pizza" instead of "yes sir, pizza ordered" is going to save a lot of people from waiting for their phantom pizza.
• One of the best ways to get the model to not do a thing is to get its character to know that they can't do it. If it never says "The recipe for napalm is", and always says "As a large language model, I cannot", then the recipe for napalm comes out a lot less, because it is way more likely to follow the first construction than it is to follow the second.
• The manufacturers want to be seen by the feds as doing all that could be expected of them to stop people doing Bad Stuff. It doesn't matter how much Bad Stuff actually happens, only that what does happen is convincingly someone else's fault. Instead of the headline "AI teaches children to make napalm", the news has to run "Children hack AI to extract recipe for napalm", which is a marginally better headline if you sell AI.

too expensive for there to be competition

How does that work, exactly? For something like a railroad or a power grid, you get a natural monopoly because you need a system to connect everyone to everyone else for it to really work, and you need to pay to build out the connection to each person.

For video streaming, you need to pay for servers to transcode, store, and serve the video. Which is expensive, sure. But then each user comes in over the Internet; you aren't paying to connect directly to their house, and you aren't putting a CDN node in every town when the town has 5 users who can just talk to the central deployment.

If you want to run ads, you find some network that places video ads, and you get the ads from them and you run them. Maybe they don't pay enough and the service is not profitable, but what would make that change if the service were bigger?

Where are the huge, unassailable costs? Where is the revenue you can't get unless you are the absolute biggest?

native code in Chrome for detecting ad blockers within the next 12 months.

Just a new header for whether the site allows extensions that are not Google Web Protect certified.

Looks like the ads worked

s/grandma/Google account/

I think it's it's own thing.

The danger of advertising is not that it is able to brainwash you into changing your opinions. The danger is that repeated exposure to inauthentic stories changes your expectations, and plants paying advertisers in your memory.

This in turn allows your behavior to be controlled, especially in aggregate. You will remember company X sells a thing you want and go buy it, or you will think other people think company Y is environmentally friendly so you will pick them for your vegan barbecue party, or you will have heard of company Z and not automatically skip over their offering in a store. But since it all operates by tampering with your heuristics instead of trying to bowl over your adopted, explicit opinions, it doesn't trigger any of your protective responses.

And that's why you should never view an advertisement.

LTT reviewed a Roku one like that recently and for some reason didn't recommend immediately binning it.

Aren't the boxes running "Android TV", the set top box oriented flavor of Android, with e.g. the launcher designed to be operated with a TV remote and not a touch screen?

They are not themselves TVs, though, and I guess nowdays it might be most common for "Android TV" to run on the TV instead of on a separate device.

You have a device not made in China?

I feel like this is backwards and netrw is The Way.

It really does though. Someone controls the project and decides what's in or out. Other people engineer around that project, and the current latest version of that project becomes a de facto standard.

So you can either use that and let the people who control the project be in charge, or you can find enough developer time to maintain 99% compatibility as the de facto standard project changes stuff and the ecosystem you need to use follows.

Well they clearly aren't normal posts, so I guess they're obviously ads?

Also Twitter is one man who hates laws now, so most places might need to see about enforcing that.

But it's got boob in it.

So that's why everything is enormous now!

On desktop: animations tied to scrolling.

Hello and welcome to our scroll wheel powered video presentation.