Hey so most of us are against this nonsense, republicans haven’t won the popular vote in well over a decade. We don’t really have a say in the matter, and haven’t in a pretty long time.

Indexing and lookups on datasets as big as companies like Google and Amazon are running also take trillions of operations to complete, especially when you take into account the constant reindexing that needs to be done. In some cases, encoding data into a neural network is actually cheaper than storing the data itself. You can see this in practice with gaussian splatting point cloud capture, where they are training networks to guide points in the cloud at runtime, rather than storing the position of trillions of points over time.

I firmly believe it will slow down significantly. My prediction for the future is that there will be a much bigger focus on a few “base” models that will be tweaked slightly for different roles, rather than “from the ground up” retraining like we see now. The industry is already starting to move in that direction.

While I agree in principle, one thing I’d like to clarify is that TRAINING is super energy intensive, once the network is trained, it’s more or less static. Actually using the network isn’t dramatically more energy than any other indexed database lookup.

Actually, Windows does allow you to use an alternate “compositor”— a feature which is used quite frequently in the industrial/embedded space. Windows calls them “custom shells”. The default is Explorer, but it can be set to any executable.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/iot-enterprise/customize/shell-launcher

When I read the headline I just assumed this must be an onion article. That is not good.

It’s really not though. It’s actually pretty simple under the hood.

I program professionally, and I copy paste all the time. The difference is when I copy paste, its 10-20 lines of code, not a line or two— and I’m not fishing for a solution to the problem. I already have the optimal solution in my head, and I am just searching for the solution I already know. It’s just faster than typing it by hand 🤷🏻

That would be a dream come true for Youtube. Think about how that would affect them financially, they would be serving significantly less load, but they would still rake in all those Youtube premium subscriptions. It would effectively be campaigning to remove the users who aren’t monetized from the platform.

The feds should claw that money back. I’m sure they intended for this money to go back into the community, and this is borderline fraud.

No, they messed up. Regardless of user count, and economic context, there is a limit to how fast you can grow a company. Going beyond that limit means that you’re diluting internal company knowledge so much that everyone just ends up doing their own thing— it’s chaos. Quality control, standards, procedures, etc go out the window. You also loose your ability to create accurate, data-backed plans with a high degree of confidence the farther you get from where you are now. You can predict the impact of a few new hires pretty easily, but hundreds, when your current team is only a couple hundred? You simply can’t forecast what holes you are creating, and challenges you will encounter with that many new people (specifically, that high of a growth percentage) in that short a time period. Growing that fast is incredibly risky, and in almost all cases, a terrible business decision. I’ve worked for SEVERAL companies that have worked this way, and it always destroys the company from the inside out.

If you want confirmation, just look at their product offering. Discord has consistently come out with features that no one has been asking for in a desperate attempt to monetize their platform, while for some reason continuing to hire like crazy (I.E., spending shit tons of money). Instead of working on their core product, and finding a way to monetize that. I can (and do) pay for all the messaging platforms I use out of principle, and I would happily pay more if their platform were more reliable. They could easily gate features in a way that generates them money, but instead of doing that, they let the core platform stagnate and add all this paid crap no one wants, of course they aren’t making money. This is a direct result of their company having a huge percentage of employees that do not fundamentally understand the product, because they hired too fast and diluted their internal knowledge.

It was never a scam, it was always a successful money laundering operation for the rich while covid had all the real galleries closed. It did exactly what it said on the tin. It’s just unfortunate that some people thought it was a real economy to begin with. Either way, good riddance.

Yes, that was what I was getting at. Not having true random is one thing, I understand (and like) that implementation. Apple has been doing it since the first few iPods. But Spotify “shuffle” isn’t near even, it is exactly even, as in “if you shuffle play this playlist twice two days in a row, it will play the exact same order”. Which is why people are complaining about Spotify specifically.

The problem isn’t that their random is biased or has rules, the is that it is entirely deterministic, to the point where it will play the same exact songs, in the same exact order for days. It’s as if shuffle just activates a hidden “shuffle” playlist that only updates once a week.

No chat app needs a desktop App, they need a WEB app. Generally I’m against them, but in this case it makes sense. It makes cross platform trivial, and you would never really need to use a messaging app offline anyway, browser APIs have come a LONG way. It’s also Google’s core competency. So yes, I believe they 100% have the tools if they wanted to try.

As for integration, my point is: why would Apple bother integrating with Google’s suggestions? Google has a track record of abandoning standards and ideas at the drop of a hat. Why on earth would Apple spend time, money, and engineering talent on something that’s likely to become abandonware in 2-4 years time? That’s also assuming it’s a GOOD standard, most of the previous attempts had fatal flaws that made the product dead on arrival. If Google had something compelling, and gave us a reason to believe it would be around for more than a few years, I’m sure adoption would go through the roof, and Apple would want to integrate— Because it would now benefit them, they would be getting something out of the deal; More features, an established user base, etc.

Regardless, my point still stands. The reason folks on Andriod are hopping around between different chat apps every few years is because Google refuses to create a robust chat app, and commit to it. Apple has power in this space because Google has refused to seriously, honestly try. If Google had a GOOD chat app, and a track record to prove it’s going to stick around, Apple would be much more open to integrating with another ecosystem, because it would be beneficial for them to do so.

I am fully in the Apple ecosystem, including my phone, work laptop, personal laptop, and an Apple watch. I pretty much exclusively use telegram, and sometimes Discord, not iMessage— and that’s not a niche or unpopular opinion in my experience either. This is absolutely because Google can’t stick with one app or product long enough to gain any market share. Each time they have tried, it’s lasted barely a year or so before they killed it.

Is it really tin foil at this point? Their core business model is hoovering up data to serve advertisements.

The GM software will ALWAYS be better than Carplay/Andriod Auto, because the metric they are optimizing for is being able to add microtransactions to your car after you’ve bought it, not optimizing for the user experience.

They can be far more predatory on their own you see.

If someone thinks AirPods Max sound amazing, they’re agreeing how good compressed audio can sound, whether they realize it or not.

Yes! (Kinda) I’m not saying lossless music is the end all be all, and honestly in normal life I prefer non-lossless, because its SOO much less data, and you can hardly tell the difference in normal listening anyway. What I was trying to express was how bad badly done compression can sound. Good compression exists, and it can sound nearly identical anecdotally, but there is a limit to how low you can go before you start hearing it, and I’m trying to say that I think Spotify has chosen a rate below that level by default. I switched to a higher profile and the problem is mostly gone.