ryan @ ryan @the.coolest.zone

I admin the.coolest.zone, the coolest site on the net for online social eng

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2 yr. ago

Trust me, I still haven't gotten over the untimely deaths of Inbox or Play Music, and my comment history will show me raging about Google's inability to have a coherent messaging strategy. (By the way, you forgot the original Google Chat which was killed off before Hangouts!)

It's the same story every time. An app/service with excellent potential, left to stagnate for years, retired. It's at the point I don't bother trying anything new Google puts out because I can't trust that I won't be rugpulled again.

Edit: my mistake, it was called Google Talk, which was renamed to Gmail Chat, which was killed off in favor of Hangouts.

I just tried the photo sphere mode again for old times' sake. It sure hasn't gotten any better. Maybe they're removing it so they can make and release a better version, but I won't hold my breath.

AI is absolutely taking off. LLMs are taking over various components of frontline support (service desks, tier 1 support). They're integrated into various systems using langchains to pull your data, knowledge articles, etc, and then respond to you based on that data.

AI is primarily a replacement for workers, like how McDonalds self service ordering kiosks are a replacement for cashiers. Cheaper and more scalable, cutting out more and more entry level (and outsourced) work. But unlike the kiosks, you won't even see that the "Amazon tech support" you were kicked over to is an LLM instead of a person. You won't hear that the frontline support tech you called for a product is actually an AI and text to speech model.

There were jokes about the whole Wendy's drive thru workers being replaced by AI, but I've seen this stuff used live. I've seen how flawlessly they've tuned the AI to respond to someone who makes a mistake while speaking and corrects themself ("I'm going to the Sacramento office -- sorry, no, the Folsom office") or bundles various requests together ("oh while you're getting me a visitor badge can you also book a visitor cube for me?"). I've even seen crazy stuff like "I'm supposed to meet with Mary while I'm there, can you give me her phone number?" and the LLM routes through the phone directory, pulls up the most likely Marys given the caller's department and the location the user is visiting via prior context, and asks for more information - "I see two Marys here, Mary X who works in Department A and Mary Y who works in Department B, are you talking about either of them?"

It's already here and it's as invisible as possible, and that's the end goal.

It's the same shit that's flooding Amazon right now. It's just cheaper to buy directly from China. A lot of the electronics will likely reflect the lower price point (I got a pair of Lenovo earbuds which are decent for the $10 I paid and actually don't seem to be knockoffs, but they're not exactly high quality). Some electronics will likely be scams, and anything with memory should probably be quarantined and wiped so you don't accidentally install a keylogger onto your system.

Clothing will be sized oddly or contain errors as they're being pumped out by what are basically sweatshops at high volume.

I mean, it's really hard to be ethical about buying clothing at all at this point without doing a ton of research - even established clothing brands have been caught out using factories with sweatshop conditions. But at least those established brands are likely to have some quality control that prevents harmful chemicals from being used - not necessarily so with Temu, they're very reactive (will recall when pointed out to them but not proactively checking) so that's another avenue to consider.

I will be forever mad about Voyager. Everything was set up to succeed: crew conflict! Unknown location! Some good actors! Voyager was a nice looking ship!

And then, famously, the actors playing humans were told to be blah and less dynamic to let the alien characters stand out more, and the series had to follow a more stagnant TNG style (they tried to serialize certain plot threads which I appreciate but were confined to episodes of the week a lot of the time).

Like, I can just imagine a mirror universe where the entirety of season 1 was the Starfleet and Maquis crews learning to work together, and conflict and drama as they're brought together by even more hostile external forces, and also the actors were allowed to actually act and stuff.

I'm trying to figure out how you trigger auto flushing just by leaning over. Meanwhile, auto flush on most public toilets I've used has a 50-50 shot of just not working at all, so I have to find the manual button.

At least for me, I know that I have a small butt and don't sit all the way back against the seat (there's quite a lot of space), so often these sensors don't catch me in the first place. Do you lean so far you move away from the sensor or something?

Regardless, both of us have relatively unique problems, I think. These sensors have been tuned to the average ass.

Oh man, you've got me itching to get into the intricacies of JavaScript...

One fun example of the difference: when doing arithmetic operations, null is indeed converted to 0, but undefined is converted to NaN. This has to do with null being an assigned value that represents empty, whereas undefined is not actually a value but a response indicating that there was no value assigned in the first place.

Upvote is like a Mastodon favorite, and should be used similar to a favorite across other ActivityPub implementations. Boost, likewise, is common across other implementations.

(Fun fact though: kbin originally had these reversed - upvote performed a boost, and what is now called "boost" was originally favorite! This was switched a bit ago for better interoperability with Lemmy and other AP implementations.)

Downvote, to my knowledge, is a unique implementation to Lemmy/kbin.

I think it could be fun if it were opt-in per community, similar to custom awards on Reddit but free. The downside would be losing compatibility with other ActivityPub implementations (although FireFish does have emoji reactions so implementing it the same way as FF would help to set a standard).

Pants sizes. For women, drop the even/odd numbering for women and juniors and move to waist and inseam like men. For everyone, implement some sort of standard policy where the actual measured size can't be more than an inch off the stated size (to account for variability in manufacturing and such).

I love my Charge 5. I'm glad Google is keeping the series going. Whenever they inevitably sunset the tiny Charge watches and start pushing the big ol' smart watches that don't work for my tiny wrists and have a bunch of features I don't care about, that's when I'm bowing out.

I'm 34. Yes, my bones hurt, but it's not terrible and I'd rather stay 34 forever (or at least drastically slow my aging, like if there were serious side effects I could take one every two days and effectively double my longevity).

Sign me up. Even if there's side effects like nausea or whatever. I'll do whatever it takes to stop my bones hurting more every year.

Ok, I'm gonna get into this.

2005: Google Talk released.
2013: Google Hangouts released.
2015: Google announces Google Talk shutting down, encourages people to move to Hangouts.
2016: Despite Hangouts being a one stop shop for SMS and Chat, Google discourages people from using it for SMS, asking people to use the Google Messages app instead.
2016: Google Allo released.
2016: RCS adoption begins.
2017: Google Talk shuts down.
2017: Google Chat released.
2017: Hangouts is re-targeted for business and moves to some sort of consumer freemium model?
2018(?): YouTube Chat released, a 1:1 messaging system inside of YouTube. No idea when it was discontinued but it didn't last long.
2019: Google Allo discontinued.
2022: Whatever was left of Hangouts is discontinued.
2023: RCS through Google Messenger is now default instead of SMS and group messages are finally encrypted.

Compare this to:
2011: iMessage released. As far as I can tell, it's been e2e encrypted since at least 2012 and potentially since release.

Google, you have no fucking leg to stand on. Get your shit together. If you had had a coherent messaging strategy, maybe Apple would have been amenable to working with you, but what incentive do they have right now? For all anyone knows, you'll drop RCS by 2026 in favor of moving everyone to Google Heythere, the new ridiculous app for messaging!

From Fight the New Drug (it's an anti-porn site but I'll use their statistics and leave out the moralizing):

"While pornography consumption for young adults has been repeatedly reported to be approximately 75% for men and 30% for women, these rates are considerably lower than those found in this study. In this study, consumption rates of men were generally consistent (91–99%) across time frames, though women’s consumption varied more widely (60–92%). Interestingly, this range in reported rates for women is consistent with the variability found in previous literature, which may be indicative of a profound impact of assessment methods (Hald et al., 2014).

Notably, 11% of women in our sample primarily consumed written pornography compared to other pornography modalities (with written pornography being 90–100% of the total pornography they consumed [...] Alternatively stated, if written pornography had not been included in this study, our consumption rate for women using pornography in the past month would drop to approximately 49% from 60% reporting consumption. A similar pattern of decreased endorsement would have occurred across all time frames.

So video and photographic pornography is targeted more towards men as the primary consumers.

I can't find the exact timestamp but Jonathan Frakes does point out the single bathroom on the Enterprise D in the 1994 documentary "Journey's End: The Saga of Star Trek — The Next Generation."

But why would you use it when you can just use the holodeck? (crude humor warning)

God I love beef stroganoff. Haven't had it in years. My mom used to make it for dinner sometimes. What a delicious meal.

Absolutely, that was my point and I worded it poorly :) If Troi were any more telepathic, Starfleet shouldn't allow her to practice mental health services. She's right at the edge where it's really useful before it becomes terrifying.

Ok but would y'all actually want to see a mental health counselor who could read your mind? I'd avoid the psychiatry department like the plague.