snailmailman

Is there any ad targeting that is good?

The main place I see ads is YouTube on iOS. I used to have ad targeting turned off, but I’ve since opted into all of googles tracking and ad-targeting, in attempt to curate the ads I see and improve them.

I’ve had all the Google tracking and ad-targeting turned on for close to a year now. Google still can’t even target me ads that are in English. I can’t read Chinese or Turkish or Spanish but I still get ads in those languages. Most of the ads are still scams or questionably legal products. And nearly all advertisements are blatantly targeted toward the wrong demographics. I get both “you can buy this multi million dollar hotel” and “you can use food stamps at our store”. I sometimes see advertisements for local politicians (same state), which might be targeted, but I just as frequently see ads for politicians I cannot possibly vote for. (opposite side of the country)

Well, it closes the apps somewhat arbitrarily, but they definitely arent all open. If the most recent app is a resource-intensive game or something it will more aggressively close things. but you can have more open if they are all lightweight apps.

But the switcher shows every app ever opened and tries to pretend these apps aren't being closed. Right now for instance, i just checked and as best i can tell, the last 3 were open. going back any further and i could tell the app had to reload. but i can scroll to the left back forever. the one on the furthest left i easily haven't opened for months

At least on iPhone, it basically doesn't do anything. Apple aggressively kills all background apps automatically. the "open" apps in the switcher are almost always just screenshots of previously-open-but-now-closed apps. if it was recent, the latest app or two in the switcher might actually be open, but rarely more than that.

Despite this, many of my relatives have somehow learned this habit of opening the switcher and closing all apps when they are done with them.

I think it goes back further than 1998. Several old systems had special memory locations where the numbers written would then read back changed. The Apollo Guidance computer for instance didn’t have a shift-right or shift-left cpu instruction. They would write data to a specific area of memory that would modify the data to shift bits around.

Although I’m sure it’s quite different. The cpu and memory hardware is so completely different. And basic bit manipulation is hardly computation.

I forget exactly which antidepressant I was on, but when i finally stopped taking it, i was instructed to reduce dosage by half a pill every two weeks.

Anecdotally, that was not anywhere close to slow enough. I had panic attacks almost every day while I was reducing the dosage. Those weeks were hell. I couldn’t think straight. I honestly don’t remember much of what occurred during that time, because the withdrawal took over my life. The pills were too tiny to split into fourths easily, but I wish I had done something to reduce dosage in smaller increments or over a longer time period.

It makes me strongly reconsider ever taking any antidepressants ever again. They didn’t tell me when I started taking them that the withdrawal would be so terrible. Those months were easily some the worst of my life.

Lots of projects run their own git or forgejo or similar. I run my own private forge, and it has a higher uptime than GitHub. (A shockingly low bar, tbh)

It’s surprisingly simple to setup, and the hardware requirements are pretty small for a private or small forge, as it’s usually a relatively small number of users/repos/etc.

One of the many reasons I stopped using the platform is because after Elon took over, my carefully tuned algorithmic feed stopped showing me content I was interested in and instead promoted bigots and nazis into my feed. Nearly all of the accounts I followed promptly went elsewhere instead of having to endure the platform.

I only check literally one account occasionally, and via xcancel. The last post I looked at on the platform was vaguely supportive of the LGBT community- all top replies were all blatantly homophobic and had slurs in them. It was via xcancel so I wasn’t logged in. That’s not a personalized algorithm showing me bigotry that’s just what the platform is now.

There have already been stories about meta contractors being able to watch the footage people are recording with the glasses. Recordings included people undressing, on the toilet, and other explicit stuff.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/meta-workers-seeing-dist...

Spotify uses this and it annoys me all the time.

If you screenshot what you are listening to, after the screenshot is taken spotify will open a full-screen popup to "share" the song you are listening to. This is quite dumb, especially since if you wanted to share a song via the screenshot, you can do so in the OS-level screenshot UI, and then you would close it and see Spotify's own similar version of the same UI. Spotify just really wants you to use their own share button so that they can track you.

This page is just asking people to upload PII? Without any information about the technology or why it should be trusted?

Is it doing the redaction locally? is it selling all my data?

In addition to that kind of “benign” tampering, there was also tampering other webpages to insert the name of the person who was doing the exposé on archive.is. Either to slander that person further (in addition to the DDOS archive.is was already attempting) or to dox the person.

This depends a lot on the game and the situation. If hidden well enough i suspect it can play well. I really enjoyed the difficulty of Half Life Alyx for instance. I was saving my resources carefully because they seemed very sparse.

But then I noticed that the loot was entirely dynamic. I forget the exact items, but if you only use one grenade it will only generate one refill hidden around the next area. If you use all your resources though, the upcoming loot gets massively increased and you can usually get almost all of it back right away. I learned this partway through and completely changed my playstyle and really broke the immersion to see the game difficulty change in realtime. I reloaded a save and played differently, and the next area was filled with loot instead of empty. But when asking my friends what they thought, none of them noticed that the game was doing this, and they all thought it was well balanced.

On the other hand, some Mario games now will essentially have a "you are dying a lot, here is a star power up to help you out, or heres luigi to play the level for you" mechanic. For a super casual game, such a mechanic is great. Its optional. If you want to lock-in and beat the hard level, you can just not grab the powerup, or say no to the prompt. But if you are getting frustrated, you can skip the hard parts and fly through to the next level and get right back to having fun.

Sexualized? It’s just a cartoon/anime character holding a magnifying glass

I’m mostly fine with this. Their free teir was crazy generous. 24GB of ram for free is a lot. They were a very popular host for free Minecraft servers because of it.

Their communication about this change has been pretty awful. It began with a silent change to the docs a month or so back, and a lot of people worrying that they would suddenly be charged. It looks like there’s actually a date associated with the change now at least. This article mentions an email that went out? I haven’t gotten any such email. I’ve already reduced my instances to within the upcoming limit, so maybe that’s why? I don’t know.

I wish it was a problem with my vpn/exit node. But I get these captchas when I’m not on a VPN. I assume it’s just because I don’t login to Google and I enable tracking prevention stuff in Firefox? But that’s really only on my desktop. I get them on my iphone too which is vanilla iOS safari. I get captchas and the cloudflare checkboxes extremely frequently, and sometimes cannot get past them at all.

I saw the articles about residential proxies on TVs recently and honestly have been worried something like that was the cause, but I’ve kept an eye on my network traffic and I don’t notice anything suspicious. Pretty sure I’m not part of a botnet or proxy or anything; but maybe other nearby IPs are.

Maybe I’ll give SearxNG a try. Searching is bad enough as it is, it can’t make it too much worse.

I’ve always been tempted to set up SearXNG, but all the search engines already make me do captchas and anti-bot checkboxes every few searches. Wouldn’t a meta search engine run into the same issues? Or if I had a local server scraping search results pages wouldn’t I instantly get banned from all the major searches? I guess I already feel pseudo-banned from them so maybe it’s not actually a problem.

Just a few minutes ago I dared to do a google search and Google refused to show me results because apparently my iPhone with latest iOS seems like an “automated search”.

The big one that annoys me is YouTube. There are exactly 3 results for any given search and then it reverts to an algorithmic feed based on your interests. This seems at least sometimes different now and for some results it gives exclusively shorts now which isn’t very helpful either.

I’ve done searches for an exact video that I know the title of and have been unable to find it. The search is useless.

Seeing lots of glowing reviews of this feature. Unfortunately it does not work for me. If anything, the dots just distract me or make it worse.

Glad it works for some people though! Weird how our brains work. Surprising to me that some small dots can be so helpful.

From what I understand the Bluetooth is required to ensure proximity. It isn’t actually used to transmit anything of vital importance. The QR is doing most of that. It’s just there to prevent scanning the QR through a video call and logging in from elsewhere.

Which I’m sure is great in theory. But IMO just adds even more complexity to a system that already has several moving parts and is more fragile than it should be.

This is good in theory but in practice doesn't always work. It isn't just a QR code like I would like it to be, its a QR code and you need bluetooth. Maybe there is a hypothetical world where bluetooth drivers actually work on windows machines and can connect to a mobile device seamlessly but that is not my experience. Across multiple windows machines i often have a problem where windows just decides the machine doesn't have bluetooth, and will refuse to display the QR code without any explanation. It doesn't tell you that bluetooth is the problem it just says "insert a hardware token to authenticate".

I would love for this feature to actually work but every time I've needed it to it hasn't. Literally this week I only had a passkey on my phone, but at the time I was in Linux with Firefox, and afaict the qr code workflow basically requires either chrome or windows 10.

An anonymous answer to a question is more trustworthy to me. They have no reason to lie. They are usually answering out of kindness. At least they used to be. Now it’s often actually bots advertising a product or pushing something, pretending to be a helpful user with an anecdote and a good experience using a niche product.

AI shouldn’t have any reason to lie. But its lies aren’t intentional. It’s just actually making things up and “hallucinating” when it pretends that an option or setting exists, or confidently claims something entirely untrue, and makes up a source to go with it. For something Google is willing to shove into the top of every search result it’s crazy the percentage of time the answer is blatantly incorrect.

Apartment advertisements are already doing this. With the caveat that the sense of scale (and literally everything about the apartment space tbh) can be entirely tampered with.

Oh yeah, this tiny apartment can definitely fit all this furniture. It’s not all ai generated at 2/3rds the size of any real furniture.

Weird that it’s inconsistent

Works fine for me in desktop Firefox. But on mobile iOS the “whole video within a jpeg” is 3 frames, all of which are nearly entirely solid color brown->orange->red with a vague cat silhouette. The color changes each frame, so you can tell it’s “working” but it’s certainly not what I’d call a video.

I was surprised when I pulled it up on my desktop and it did actually play like a video. Wonder if it’s causing some weird iOS image decoding glitch/edge case.

I’ve always been under the impression that Signal is for secure, private chats and group chats amongst friends and small groups. While telegram is often used more like discord or irc, with “secure” and “private” group chats that are extremely large and semi-public. “Invite only” but invites are handed out easily. Those chats are pretty obviously not as secure, as basically anybody can join them and decrypt the chat. On the surface its somewhat more secure than discord, where discord will be scanning all chat content.

I asked “Alexa+” (the new AI/LLM Alexa), what time one of the upcoming World Cup games is. It was off by two hours due to time zones. This was a big enough mistake that I caught it, and followed up with “I’m pretty sure that’s wrong” and then it tried to correct itself and gave me a new time that was off by hour in the opposite direction.

I guess my time zone wasn’t in the context? So it just hallucinates the wrong coastal time zone twice when I’m not in either one. But who knows where exactly it messed up because it could have just picked a random hour and a would have had the same outcome.

I’ve only used Alexa a half dozen times since the release of Alexa+ but it has been confidently incorrect about 100% of the queries.

I think it’s been functionally login-only for a while, unfortunately.

Any time I try to use the site while logged out I immediately hit all sorts of rate limits and spam prevention measures. Issues and pull requests stop loading almost immediately. Searches are extremely restricted, like i think literally one search is all you get sometimes unless you login.

It’s hard to tell how much of this is intentional and how much is GitHub infra not being stable. My daily renovate bot that looks for updates for specific packages times out and encounters errors almost every time it runs and it’s barely doing anything. And it has an api key. I know I’m not hitting limits, some queries just don’t work >50% of the time on some repos.

Sometimes I see there are 200 issues, I click the issues tab, and there are zero. Is GitHub down? Am I rate limited? Do I just need to login? Or I know an issue/PR exists, and it just doesn’t appear when I search for the title or keywords verbatim. I just manually bookmark or subscribe to any important issue or PR now because the UI can’t be trusted anymore.

Its a fun challenge.

I used https://squoosh.app to make a pretty good one. Mostly just a resize and then OxiPNG for compression. Managed a 124x62 black/white image. OP has a resolution of 195x53, so I had very similar, but slightly worse i think? mostly a different aspect ratio + map projection i think.

playing with Squoosh.app is very fun, and you can very easily see how the jump from 500b to 1-2kb turns a map from "awful" to "very good" with the right settings.

I think the comment can be left on any video on the channel?

Assuming this is what you are referring to, it was resolved within a few days. The incident being resolved just didn't make headlines. https://sourceforge.net/p/veracrypt/discussion/general/threa...

With fast boot, it is a partial-hibernate (as you said, it is basically logging out then hibernating). But also, you are shutting the device down. You can hibernate a laptop and take the battery out. The device is off. Thats the difference between sleep and hibernate. Sleep still uses power.

Hibernate is a true power off, with instructions for the PC to load ram from disk on next boot. IME hibernate often works more reliably, because sleep states can be buggy, and hibernate just powers off the device. Hibernate is slower though, and can have its own issues (often related to disk encryption)

Sleep being buggy is a mystery to me, but has happened on nearly every laptop i've owned. I think too many things can wake slept device or prevent sleep. Leading to "I closed my laptop and put it in my bag. Then it woke up and got hot and span the fans until it died". But ive also had many instances where some apps are more buggy after waking from sleep (ive had issues like video playback failing after wake, presumably related to hardware video decode), or certain peripherals don't handle it well, and windows reshuffles monitors or changes a microphone since the "default" was briefly gone, or a mouse/keyboard doesnt wake the device from sleep when they should, etc. Phones and tablets seem to handle low power states really well, but ive literally never had a good experience with it on a laptop or desktop.