CivBase

Isn't that still better than it all getting destroyed?

Also if someone is buying new goods for pennies on the dollar, I'd expect them to find some value in more than 2% of the stock.

Regardless of whether they respect the law, why would a business pay for goods just to destroy them? How does that make money?

And if they're NOT destroying the goods but are instead using them, then the law is doing exactly what it is intended to.

I primarily use NewPipe, but I'll also throw out Grayjay as a client with similar benefits. They work a little differently and since Google sometimes pushes out breaking changes to YouTube's API, I'll switch to Grayjay while I wait for the eventual NewPipe update. In my experience, the Grayjay player also tends to work better with live streams.

It absolutely works with YouTube shorts. It just doesn't put them in your subscriptions or let an algorithm feed them to you.

Seems more like an easy excuse to shut down a means for people to bypass their paywalls. It would be trivial for AI companies to continue getting this data without using the Internet Archive.

I gave reasons for why Discord would escalate things. Your mocking example did not. That's the difference between a slippery slope fallacy and a legitimate argument.

> This is false. Age verification is not mandatory for all accounts. You will be able to join a Discord with your friends, chat, and do voice without age verification.

You are correct. For now. But why would they stop there?

Supposedly this is to protect teens. If that's true, why would they continue letting teens chat with anonymous users? What if they get tricked into sharing sensitive images or video of themselves? Surely we need to know everyone's ID to ensure teens aren't unwittingly chatting with a known predator. It's for their safety. But for now that's a bridge too far. For now.

And why should we believe this even has anything to do with protecting teens? That's valuable data. Discord says they're not holding onto it... for now. But Discord is offering quite a lot to users for free. Why let such an obvious revenue source go unmonetized? They're doing this now because they're going public soon. Investors want an ROI and this action is sure to invite some competition. The people leaving want an alternative, so a competitor could get a foothold. Discord needs to stay ahead. And the users Discord keeps after this stunt are going to be the most resilient to leaving - the most exploitable. Surely they wouldn't care if the policy changes in the future.

The sky isn't falling. But the frog is boiling.

If AI is the key to compiling natural language into machine code like so many claim, then the AI should output machine code directly.

But of course it doesn't do that becaude we can't trust it the way we do a traditional compiler. Someone has to validate its output, meaning it most certainly IS meant for humans. Maybe that will change someday, but we're not there yet.

The implementation doesn't matter. Current options for bypassing it don't matter. The nature of the content being blocked doesn't matter.

The root problem is that Discord is asking users for their real identity in exchange for accessing social media content. That is a line that simply should not be crossed.

They can change the implementation later. They can make it harder to bypass. They can identify users who bypassed it and start them over from square one. They can change what type of content is blocked. They can alter the deal, but users cannot take back their identity once it is handed over.

Discord has become a platform that is outwardly adversarial to its users. Don't try to fight it. Don't keep investing in a platform that's actively hostile to you. Cut your losses now and find something else.

> If writing the code is the easy part, why would I want someone else to write it?

When was writing code ever the hard part?

If contributors aren't solving problems, what good are they? Code that doesn't solve a problem is cruft. And if a problem could be solved trivially, you probably wouldn't need contributions from others to solve it in the first place.

If I were a creator, I'd start looking into platforms other than Patreon. What does Patreon offer that makes them worth giving up 30% of my revenue?

Please explain.

I wonder if the Unix philosophy of small apps will eventually further the capabilities of AI in regards to app development. If these AI could be used contribute to a shared library of small apps, then maybe that library could be used to iteratively build more and more capable apps. Shoulders of giants and all that.

That would certainly be preferable to the flood of AI-fueled monoliths predicted by this author. But maybe I'm being too optimistic.

> Programming with AI is like tutoring a child. You teach the child, tell it where it made mistakes and you keep iterating and monitoring the child until it makes what you want.

Who are you people who spend so much time writing code that this is a significant productivity boost?

I'm imagining doing this with an actual child and how long it would take for me to get a real return on investment at my job. Nevermind that the limited amount of time I get to spend writing code is probably the highlight of my job and I'd be effectively replacing that with more code reviews.

You could say that about litterally anything. Food, housing, fuel, heat, water. There are always solutions for better optimizing global resource allocation - especially if you're willing to ignore the wants and rights of the people.

In most cases the market rewards closed source. You can't reasonably expect that to change by pressuring consumers. We need regulation here.

I'm amazed there isn't more of an outcry against these things. I'm not an environmental activist, but even I'd feel wrong just throwing something like that away.

> using AI software to measure atmospheric conditions

What is this even supposed to mean?

To me this comes across as "I'm not sure if you'll be impressed by a supersonic jet that can surpress sonic booms, so I shoehorned AI into the description to jazz it up." It makes me wonder why the author doesn't think the former is impressive enough on its own.

Is this true? I'm trying to think of a solid example and I'm drawing blanks.

Apartments aren't really comparable to houses. They're relatively small units which are part of a larger building. The better comparison would be to condominiums, but good luck even finding a reasonably priced condo in most parts of the US. I'd guess supply is low because there's a housing shortage and it's more profitable to rent out a unit as an apartment than to sell it as a condo.

It seems to me that most people rent because 1) they only need the thing temporarily or 2) there are no reasonable alternatives for sale.

If an LLM were capable of reliably detecting AI-generated content, then it would also be capable of producing content that does not appear to be AI generated.

So either A) LLMs are intentionally, universally making their content look AI-generated despite having the capability to do otherwise or B) LLMs cannot reliably detect AI output and their responses on the subject are complete BS.

Windows can be a good desktop OS. It just takes a lot of work to get it there. And you have to keep putting in a little more work with each update.

I set up a lot of PCs and what has astounded me is how much less work it takes. Unlike with Windows, most of the defaults are fine. I don't have to scour through all the settings after a fresh install. I only need to install half as many apps. I don't have to run powershell scripts to debloat everything. And I don't have to worry about updates undoing all the changes I've made in the future.

Christmas happened. People got new PCs with Windows 11 preinstalled on them. This says nothing about the popularity of Windows itself.

I think we've reached a point where Windows is about as rough as Linux. But the problem is still that people are familiar with Windows and have learned how to deal with the roughness; not so on Linux. And so long as Windows owns the business and education sectors, it will always have the benefit of that familiarity.

> Use an Apple TV for the "smart" features.

Use a PC for "smart" features. Used PC hardware is cheap and plenty effective. And the Logitech K400 is better than any TV remote.

No spying (unless you run Windows). Easy ad blocking. No reliance on platform-specific app support. Native support for multiple simultaneous content feeds (windows) - even from different services.

And it's not like it's complicated. My parents are as tech-illiterate as they come and they've been happily using an HTPC setup for over well over a decade. Anyone who can operate a "Smart TV" can certainly use a web browser.

I also have a 10 year old laptop with no TPM 2.0 module. It was pretty high end for the time too (Dell XPS). I haven't needed it for much in recent years, but it still runs perfectly fine and I'm happy to continue using it if the need arises again. Sounds like I'll have to switch that over to Linux like I have all my other PCs.

I don't think you understand the situation. He's not getting security updates. He's not an expense. Microsoft is incurring no costs by allowing him to continue using his existing operating system without updates.

Microsoft doesn't want him to go away. They want him to buy their new product.

The author just wants Microsoft to stop harassing him. He's not asking for handouts. He's not even asking to be allowed to bypass the hardware requirements for Windows 11. He just wants to stop getting nagged by Microsoft to upgrade.

He could buy new hardware and run Windows 11. But this pattern will only continue from Microsoft. The only way out is to run a non-Microsoft OS (assuming he can).

I switched back to Firefox around the quantum release and have been very happy with it since. I certainly have some complaints, but it's night and day compared to what Google wants me to deal with.

I think the author was close to something here but messed up the landing.

To me the difference between something like AI translation and an LLM is that the former is a useful feature and the latter is an annoyance. I want to be able to translate text across languages in my web browser. I don't want a chat bot for my web browser. I don't want a virtual secretary - and even if I did, I wouldn't want it limited to the confines of my web browser.

It's not about whether there is machine learning, LLMs, or any kind of "AI" involved. It's about whether the feature is actually useful. I'm sick of AI non-features getting shoved in my face, begging for my attention.

The author provides a single critisism ("The italic is mediocre"), does not elaborate, then immediately hedges their critique.

Helvetica is used as an example of a font which garners more "affection" in contrast to TNR, but is never praised by the author or recommended as an alternative - at least not in the linked passage.