Gregory's Server
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And, bonus #caturday, this neighbour came for a short visit and did a routine inspection tour of the flat 😄 This neighbour came for a short visit earlier and seemed to be in good spirits. #caturday There is an upside to how dysfunctional Google has become in it’s post-layoff all-in-on-Ai era. For every spam website that rises to the top of their badly maintained search engine a dozen pirated movies and TV series that are otherwise unavailable in Iceland get hosted on Youtube Youtube has always been lax at taking down black and white movies and older European movies (like 60s and 70s stuff) I’m guessing that’s because studios have to submit material for content ID and don’t care or don’t have the files for older stuff, but I’ve been seeing HD videos, both old and newish (post 2000) so it’s starting to look like their content ID system isn’t working as well as it used to  “How do you accidentally run for President of Iceland? | by Anna Andersen” Glad somebody wrote about this because it’s an objectively hilarious UX case study (And they just announced that eleven people managed to get the requisite number of endorsements in time) https://uxdesign.cc/how-do-you-accidentally-run-for-president-of-iceland-0d71a4785a1e
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 @baldur I sent this to our UX research team as an example for them to use to show people how important UX is!  Please stop using generated art for thumbnails and illustrations for videos and blog posts that aren’t generated themselves. It gives people the impression that the post is spammy bullshit. Starting to see people dismiss links out of hand just because of the preview thumbnail on social media
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 @baldur "that aren’t generated themselves": what do you want to say? Art is always generated by one or some artists. This means that a human (or even an animal) has painted, photographed, drawn, glued it etc. @baldur It seems that hosting sites (substack) are now adding genAI link preview images automatically, without the knowledge of the post author or them even appearing in the actual post. This is because on certain social sites (facebook) posts without a preview image get fewer clicks…. and clicks are everything. 😉 For today’s #caturday, a few pictures from late 2022 when Kolka had just recently arrived at my sister’s and was still in the process of getting acclimated to people and investigating her surroundings For today’s #caturday post, another batch of photos from my sister of her cat Kolka, a black-and-white rescue who has gone from semi-feral to “hey, people give scritches!” “Adactio: Journal—Ad revenue” The important point: behavioural ads aren’t actually more effective than the rest. https://adactio.com/journal/21043 “Antitrust, Meta, Apple and more | Ian Betteridge” "But governments mandate how products are designed all the time, and not just in the EU." https://ianbetteridge.com/2024/04/01/antitrust-meta-apple-and-more/ My sister just sent me another batch of photos of her cat, Kolka, who is very much enjoying the comfort of indoors (Kolka spent the first 18 months of her life outdoors in the Icelandic weather and seems to be quite done with outdoors thankyewverymuch, to my sister’s relief.) I’ll let you in on a secret: I love sporadically updated weblogs. I subscribe to over 1200 feeds and most of them are sporadic or even technically “inactive”. Months often pass between updates It means that every post published was important to the writer Back in the days of snail mail, letters that began with “It’s been a while since I last wrote to you” were the ones people cherished the most You don’t need to post every day or even every week to have a blog that matters
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“There is no EU cookie banner law” "But also because, while people think terrible banners are legal requirements enforced from the EU, most cookie banners are actually… illegal according to the EU law." https://www.bitecode.dev/p/there-is-no-eu-cookie-banner-law
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  @baldur I get mad every time I see a "this website only uses technical cookies" banner, especially on public institutions' websites “Following Links - Jim Nielsen’s Blog” I always try to follow links. You always end up somewhere interesting. https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/following-links/ My sister has sent me another batch of photos of her cat, Kolka, being very relaxed. Hard to imagine that this cat was semi-feral and hid from all people when she first arrived “No more forever projects — Diana Kimball Berlin” This is an aspect of creating book-like objects that I happen to really enjoy. https://dianaberlin.com/posts/no-more-forever-projects JFC, people in tech are really out there saying that language models will be better at therapy, financial advice, and career advice than trained people. WTF is wrong with you people? Do you really have no clue about what other people’s jobs actually involve? Language models can’t even do maths how are they supposed to get good at financial advice? And therapy? Just… 😑 What’s wrong with people in tech?
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@baldur while it certainly won't replace therapists its actually a useful tool, already used by people to cope with stuff. It's in some cases more useful than a therapist, for example at 3am in the night when there is a mental breakdown going on or when you rather need someone to just listen and don't want to think about how that person thinks of you. Also if there is a crisis ai is a fast first responder and are surprisingly good at comforting humans  @baldur my bet is on tech people resenting these business folks for putting their office in the basement  @baldur People I Tech are stupid. They will promise the earth and deliver nothing. They also have little to no knowledge about what other people do and have no respect for what other people do. When they say that AI will can do what a doctor does ask them to seek patient care with the AI and you will note how quickly they backtrack. “Exists is the enemy of good” "This idea is pretty simple, in principle: sometimes we miss a good-enough solution because a not-quite-good-enough solution is already out there and in use." Not only that. Often good-enough is quickly turned into not-quite-good-enough in an effort to make more money https://seancoates.com/blogs/exists-is-the-enemy-of-good @baldur one of the things I love about FOSS projects is there will often be someone who is unwilling to let "good enough" stand. They are going to suggest changes to make it better... always getting closer to perfect at that point in time. But perfection is elusive. Perfect for PHP7 becomes far from good enough in PHP8. As long as someone is willing to push different levels of the stack closer to perfection, the entire stack will continue to evolve and improve. “Literacy crisis in college students: Essay from a professor on students who don’t read.” If you’re like me and your livelihood consists of either selling textual objects or using textual objects to sell services to a youth-obsessed sector (tech) then this is seriously bad news https://slate.com/human-interest/2024/02/literacy-crisis-reading-comprehension-college.html
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 @baldur Smells fake or at least exaggerated, like critiquing a boomer caricature of young ppl rather than actual people. Completely out of touch with the reality of any young ppl I know. |
