dschuetz

It's time to install Factorio again, winter is coming.

Obey the 9 Lines.

Really? "Legions" of hackers doing quality tests on AI models?

Ah, essentially they are selling office desks to start-ups who don't need them anymore post-covid. Sounds bulletproof to me /s.

I think that many fast-growing start-ups have decided that it's cheaper and safer to work from home, so maybe WeWork needs to start working and look for other sources of revenue. or do nothing and implode.

What does WeWork actually sell? I mean... what is their source of revenue, or is it just dumb me and it's my own fault that I don't know that?

No, sadly, it's just an attack vector that affects... clouds.

When do we start crypto-signing original content? If big-tech does DRM to go against piracy, why won't creative commons at least try to do the same, as for the sake of origin attribution?

> [...] that's money that would need to be spent and it's very hard to make such an argument in a corporate setting where people who make these decisions aren't the ones participating in the process.

I understand that, from economic perspective at least. "Is it worth it?" is a phrase I hear (often also saying myself) a lot when talking about investing time=money in something. I am afraid talent is absolutely worth it, and it's up to the hiring company, not the applicants, to solve that problem.

On the applicants side, especially those who are well aware of their talents, they also think "Is it worth it all? Getting a degree just to be able to apply for positions in big-time companies? I don't think so."

I see a problem here. Hiring is work that needs to be done, because it is not going away if a company wants to find talent.

It seems to me that instead of putting more effort into "sorting through the absolute flood of applications", or perhaps even finding a solution for that problem, HR just ramps the qualification bar even higher disregarding the possibility that higher education is not actually needed, and that talent is not necessarily reflected in any sort of degree. At the same time, it de-values higher education.

You absolutely expect employees having the "best" education, giving 100% and going the extra mile without actually willing to put up the work on hiring talent based on reality.

Ergo: AAA studios are setting up to fail finding talent themselves. Talent without university/college degrees rarely get a chance, so, with enough energy, they start doing stuff by themselves.

> Nowadays even for junior positions we wouldn't consider anyone without at least a bachelors degree in CS, so that's at least 3 years of university

Why?

> It isn’t perfect but we are ahead of most others (Mastodon, Matrix). We have spent TWELVE YEARS building the free, permissionless open source platform for anyone to assemble and host their own community software with all the features of Facebook/Twitter/TikTok for their own community

Why are you using Github then?

Build a new Web w/o Google.

The bright side is, when Google really pushes through with this WEI nonsense, it will not only break the Web, it will also create some kind of premium Web run by Google, analogous to gated communities. And then the worldwide Internet ad market bubble will finally burst.

Publishers want to make money. Game developer studios under contract with publishers only get a share of the revenue. That's why big publishers found their own or buy game dev studios to... <drum roll> make more money for themselves, and outcompete independent developers.

Ubisoft: Ubidead

Does that also include console copies I wonder?

I have blacklisted EA/Origin and Konami already, now Ubisoft is entering the list. Do not support money-milkers.

I wasn't aware of https://briefs.video. Now I am. And it's hilarious!

Yes, you're right. I meant, users who choose to opt out are more competent users (or just more paranoid) and might sooner understand what telemetry means and/or does. Usually, and I am assuming, competent software users tend to have much more unique and specialized usage patterns than the average joe.

Well, it's simple: AI is getting cheaper, humans are getting more expensive.

I get your point, I really do. And it got me thinking. I suppose, you're right concerning bugs and safety aspects. But, usage pattern collection is a huge problem, not only privacy-wise. This is what I do not understand:

Why are there code paths nobody uses, that have to be maintained, in the first place?

Reading this: https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/telemetry-should-you-all... I've stumbled on this:

> Optional telemetry, of course, but again - this creates a selective and unpredictable reality. Ordinary people don't care either way, and nerds will always make deliberate choices that often have nothing to do with product or profit or anything else entirely.

So, by that logic, users who opt out of telemetry are aware of why they are doing it. People who don't care share their chaotic usage patterns. This creates a false picture of usage reality, and makes software worse. In conclusion, there are only two remaining choices: 1. Make telemetry non-optional 2. Ditch telemetry and rely on QA studies

There's this anecdote (which might have been made up entirely to make a point):

Restaurant management wanted to compare different soup offerings by counting orders from each soup to determine which ones were more popular. They have selected the most popular two offerings, the rest were scrapped in order to safe money on ingredients. Soon after, not only did the order numbers of those two soup offerings drop, the total number of soup orders dropped. How come? Well, maybe nobody has asked the customers if the offered soup was tasty at all. A quick survey revealed that customers make the popular choice, find out it's crap, and then do not ever order soup again in that restaurant, or in rarer cases give the other one a shot. It turned out, the most popular offer was basically cheap crap nobody wanted to eat, and when there's nothing else, they keep ordering the same, or never visit that restaurant again.

Telemetry does not tell anything about user preferences. Who ever is selling you that idea, does not either.

AI would need far less data points to achieve an acceptable result, and maybe even be able of fingerpointing, not just fingerprinting. Just wait and see how the data broker bros start selling AI assisted data mining for ads. Big tech is doing that already. It's mind boggling how everyone seems to be just OK with that.

It does not really matter anymore how bulk usage data collection is called or whether it is "privacy-preserving".

Looking at the current developments in AI, I am concerned that AI models can easily de-anonymize and guess end point users when being fed with "telemetry data" of hundreds of thousands clients.

I hear a lot and read a lot of software and hardware vendors saying that "telemetry" is supposed to somehow magically improve the user experience in the long run, but in actuality software tends to get worse, unstable and less useful.

So, I would like to know how exactly any telemetry data from Fedora Linux clients is going to help them, or how is it going to improve anything.

Read The Freaking Manpages.

More often than not my Tumbleweed installations broke after receiving broken packages via almost daily rolling updates, so I've switched to a more stable distribution. It was just too much hassle with the constant stream of updates. I've got the feeling that Suse is field-testing package builds from their OBS and is relying on users reporting broken software.

OpenSuse Tumbleweed should be renamed to OpenSuse Testing.

While I agree that docu is important I've seen my share of garbage poured into wikis and presented as the single source of truth. It takes a lot of time and effort to make docu meaningful and useful with the outlook that it's ignored and overlooked anyways. Quality documentation is expensive, and, if one invests heavily into it there must be a clear workflow path that makes following and reviewing docu mandatory. Documenting for the sole reason of existence of docu is counterproductive.

Zuckerberg with his "Metaverse", yeah, about that. Instead of creating useful applications in VR first he spent billions into creating a metaverse nobody wants. Quoting his response to Apple's Vision: ‘could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it’s not the one that I want.’ Meh, it's freaking awesome, but mine is better, you'll see, meh. What a child.

Of course it could, but it would fail at exams, because AI cannot write programs with pen and paper :3

Alienating the entire customer base, that's the Microsoft I know!

Wait isn't that the fancy MS Pluton thing AMD decided to add to their processors to make the systems more "secure"?