read the fucking room before you come in here and advocate for your favorite plagiarism machine
right! without that, all they can show they’re outputting is averaged, imperfect video fragments of a bunch of doom runs. and maybe it’s cool (for somebody) that they can output those at a relatively high frame rate? but that’s sure as fuck not the conclusion they forced — the “an AI model can simulate doom’s engine” bullshit that ended up blowing up my notifications for a couple days when the people in my life who know I like games but don’t know I hate horseshit decided I’d love to hear about this revolutionary research they saw on YouTube
yep, our instance and a ton of mastodon instances are hosted on hetzner (though I think we’re in their Finnish datacenter?) and recently Google made a change that seems to be returning that same German text as the description for every YouTube video requested by a hetzner IP
it’s definitely annoying and user-hostile, but that’s Google for ya
I regret to inform you that you’ve been promoted to VP of Innovation
The new Alexa service will only cost you $5 to $10 a month — and not the present price of $0.
it’s also fucking remarkable how doomed this is. did they talk to none of the people responsible for frog boiling over at Prime Video? come on, we all know the steps:
- you start your janky, subpar service at $0, as a value add to an existing Amazon product. this starts you with a massive userbase right off the bat.
- you then implement a lock-in mechanism. for a streaming service that’s exclusives; for a voice assistant, that’s probably API integrations designed under an exclusivity contract
- now that switching off of your service carries consequences and the lock-in mechanism has given it an aura of prestige (even though it’s probably still janky as fuck), increase its price to $1-2 a month to see how much of your userbase is pliant and willing to accept the introduction of a subscription mechanism. do what it takes to make the idea of a subscription tolerable; segregate your userbase into paid (which get exclusives) and free (which get ads) tiers if you need to.
- now that your userbase has been primed (heh) to accept the idea of paying for a previously complementary service, boil the fuck out of that frog. increase subscription fees regularly. introduce ads even for paid tiers. run constant experiments to see how and where you can introduce ads relative to the amount you’re charging before subscriber numbers drop; use that to make the service just annoying and expensive enough that you’re still making a massive profit even after shedding what I’m very certain Amazon considers the dead weight of bad consumers.
- the product is now in its final form under capitalism: some horseshit that’s functionally and economically indistinguishable from paying a cable company far too much for a premium TV channel, but with even more ads and customer data exfiltration enabled by the underlying technology. for some shit like Alexa, the value for the customer is even worse — the platform does so little other than push ads and steal data.
but amazon’s not doing the above obvious shit they always do in this case, and I think I know why: unlike streaming, people fucking hate voice assistants, so this $5-$10 fee might just be a desperate strategy to get true believers paying (or they’re fine with killing Alexa by making the subscription version mandatory)
Amazon is releasing a new backend for its Alexa home assistant in October, to be called “Remarkable!” This will run on Anthropic’s Claude LLM chatbot. The new Alexa service will only cost you $5 to $10 a month — and not the present price of $0. [Reuters, archive]
oh this is going to go remarkably poorly. the only time I’ve seen some of my family effectively boycott a technology was when they realized all the Alexa shit they got for cheap was fucking terrible and wouldn’t stop pushing ads to them, actively trying to get them to order shit, and lighting up their bedroom with a bright notification light (for either a package status they didn’t care that much about or more ads) they couldn’t turn off. so they boxed up all their Alexa shit and asked if I needed any of it for scrap parts (I did not)
now I’m wondering if themotte was one of the places where they coordinated flooding the nix community with fash horseshit, or if they just feel that comfortable signaling that only fucking nazis are allowed in the Nix bar
lix is really cool! it’s very important to have a Nix evaluator that isn’t under fash control because none of the technology can exist without the language, and they’ve made some big improvements already to Nix’s build system, ergonomics, and internal docs — namely, a lot of the improvements the fash parts of the community fought hard to block, because technology that’s both powerful and obscure like Nix can easily be leveraged for political gain (see my previous post on this topic if you’d like more details on what the political side of this most likely looks like). I’m hoping lix proves generally resistant to assholes coming and ruining things — unfortunately, what happened to Nix keeps happening with other open source projects.
aux is another project that’s along the same lines as lix. it used to be a nixpkgs replacement, but since then it’s become something that’s a bit harder for me to decipher but probably more promising if it works — I believe it’s a reworking of the Nix standard library and other foundational pieces to be less dependent on a centralized repo and more modular. they seem to be planning a package set (tidepool) on top of that new modular foundation too, plus they’re writing up a bunch of missing language docs. if what they’re doing pans out, aux and lix could be a good basis for a Nix replacement.
the full NixOS system is unfortunately still irreplaceable for me, which fucking sucks — every computer I touch still runs it (my desktops, my laptops, the Lemmy instance where this thread lives, my fucking air conditioner thermostats…). replacing the NixOS options set and all its services and mechanisms is definitely a big job, and nobody’s managed it yet — I’ve even briefly considered GuixSD, but it’s actively becoming more hostile to running on real hardware (in the stupidest GNU way imaginable) including the hardware I run NixOS on, and the packages I rely on the most are weirdly primitive in guix (including emacs of all things).
a quick follow-up tying in with our previous post about Kroger planning AI-driven demand pricing for groceries: of course they got caught red handed price gouging
the technology is excellent, which makes what happened a shame. I’m still astounded that the fash elements of the community had this easy of a time getting their way.
and speaking of what happened, check out the little fascists who run the NixOS wiki (the third party one that was the only source of docs for a bunch of things for several years, to the point where the new official wiki just copied the third party wiki’s text on a bunch of topics) telling on themselves
“endless drug-fueled prose about drugs” is an entire, unfortunate subgenre of Rationalist authorship. it takes them a surprisingly long time (usually a couple years or so) to spiral out and stop posting, but the posts usually get even less coherent as they approach burnout
no that’s it, we’re making No Novel November a thing