Nope, Chuck Testa!

ML was is basically designed moderated to be an echo chamber, it’s right there in the name.

FTFY (though, I’m mostly being sarcastic here - like most things, moderation there is a mixed bag from community to community).

The best part is if you have Google Home/Nest products throughout your house and initiate a voice request you now have your phone using Gemini to answer and have the nearest speaker or display using Assistant to answer and they frequently hear eachother and take that as further input (having a stupid “conversation” with eachother). With Assistant as the default on a phone, the system knows what individual device it should reply to via proximity detection and you get a sane outcome. This happened at a friend’s house while I was visiting and they were frustrated until I had them switch their phone’s default voice assistant back to Assistant and set up a home screen shortcut to the web app version of Gemini in lieu of using the native Gemini app (because the native app doesn’t work unless you agree to set Gemini as the default and disable Assistant).

Missing features aside, the whole experience would feel way less schizophrenic if they only allowed you to enable Gemini on your phone if it also enabled it on each smart device in the household ecosystem via Home. Google (via what they tell journalists writing articles on the subject) acts like it’s a processing power issue with existing Home/Nest devices and the implication until very recently was that new hardware would need to roll out - that’s BS given that very little of Gemini’s functionality is being processed on device and that they’ve now said they’ll begin retroactively rolling out a beta of Gemini to older hardware in fall/winter. Google simply hasn’t felt like taking the time to write and push a code update to existing Home/Nest devices for a more cohesive experience.

I think it’s a dig at Fox. Or MacFarlane?

Yup, I have friends all over the state and just the occasional glance over the years at what Republicans have pulled in the state has been horrifying.

A side note not related to gerrymandering - I’ve seen it thrown around that Cooper can’t do it because a quirk of NC law says the Lt. Governor becomes Acting Governor anytime the sitting Governor is out of state and the current Lt. Governor is Mark “Some People Need Killing” Robinson, but I honestly think giving him a longer leash to let more people hear him bark nonsense and hate will hurt Robinson’s chances of becoming governor. Sunshine is the best medicine and all of that (to the extent that it’s not free media advertising as it was with Trump). It’s kind of a headscratcher that Robinson was elected as Lt. Governor to begin with, the dude is a walking meme/idiot and the voters really dropped the ball on that one.

Cooper because he brings NC’s electoral votes and helps keep a Trumpy person out of the governor’s mansion. His political positions are bleh, but Harris is young and should something happen to her Cooper is a decent human and would make a decent president.

Cooper also has experience dealing with gerrymandered bad-faith Republican supermajority, so I don’t think he’ll be interested in playing the compromise game.

I feel like every article out there is missing this and keeps blaming Windows Update vs an update pushed to a specific piece of software by a third-party developer. I get end-users not understanding how things work but tech writers should be more knowledgeable about the subject they write about for a living.

banned

Believe it or not, also Rule 1. Wait, wrong instance.

ding ding ding The microwave analogy they were going after makes no sense. I mean, there are semantics at play and I could have explicitly mentioned I wasn’t talking about firmware in order to exclude things that are essentially calculators and clocks but I didn’t anticipate someone going the direction of absurdist bespoke microwave OSes given that firmware alone is enough. Even at that level, you have examples like Seiko Epson inventing precision timed ticket printers for the 1964 Olympics - they’re still dominant in the arena of commercial printers to this day, yet they have allowed other manufacturers to adopt their ESC/POS language as a standard that’s still widely used across brands today, allowing for feature parity on the software functionality side from competing brands while Epson competes on the hardware reliability side. (This isn’t an endorsement of Epson, their consumer printers are trash because they’re not Brother laser printers lol.) Spoiler alert, the price tag of a commercial printer doesn’t have much to do with it being compatible with network standards (???! - standards being the key word here) and has more to do with reliability and general feature sets (in that order once competition exists for a device, see Epson vs feature identical Beiyang (insert other generic clone brand here)) and the same would hold true even if we decided to network our microwaves in some scenario where we’re also automating food going in and out of the microwave.

All of that said, if I were to modify what I was saying while keeping the sentiment the same, I would just simplify it by saying “no hardware vendor is allowed to lock their hardware to running specific software” (doesn’t mean they have to provide technical support for errors in another vendor’s software) since that gets at the root of the issue. But, going back to the original sentiment, open standards that have nothing to do with specific hardware are clearly better. Look at Apple vs x86 vs ARM, specifically Apple during the period between PowerPC (at least there were partners here, so the chips had lives outside of Apple hardware) and their M-Series - they wouldn’t have had an excuse not to offer something like BootCamp during the x86 era given that their OS clearly was able to run on off the shelf PC components and the inverse with Windows and Linux being able to run on their hardware was also clearly true. Is it a good thing that Apple hardware is once again locked in to running only their software?

Here me out, iMessage on any OS, wait, no, not just that, how about no hardware vendor is allowed to produce software that only runs on their hardware and for any given core function the hardware must prompt the end user with a competitive selection of capable apps to accomplish said function (to be downloaded and installed upon selection) instead of coming with a default option enabled. Let’s get crazy and say that any hardware vendor must allow software they produce for their own hardware to be uninstalled and replaced by software of the end user’s choosing.

I’m talking some “treating United States v. Microsoft” as legally binding precedent" shit.

Meanwhile, regulators be like… .

(Side note: what’s up with the bullshit where Apple makes an Android-native AppleTV app that will install on a phone fine but is blocked from running once it detects it’s not an AndroidTV device? Apple acts like it would be an undue burden to make iMessage for Android (and pretends they didn’t make the decision to not release an Android client with their hardware business in mind) but their Apple Music app somehow runs better on Android than it does on iOS…)

This seems like the thing that could be accomplished with just a QR code or NFC tag. Sleep As Android (alarm app) allows you to set up alarms so that you must get up and scan a QR code or tap a NFC tag in order to stop an alarm - no brick needed. It’s not a huge leap to expand that functionality to other use case scenarios (maybe this already exists, I haven’t looked into it). It seems kind of silly to have a service and retail device for something that can be handled locally on-device with BYOH for the unlocking mechanism.

edit: others have pointed this out already

The inverse of this is where subscription services that previously had no ads for paying subscribers then add in ads on paid plans while also increasing the fees associated. It’s a pretty standard practice, NYT included. Adblocking is necessary.

You’re operating under the delusion that they’re moderating in good faith.

Believe it or not, also Rule 1, straight to the banhaus you go. /s

It helps with the ergonomics of needing to lean in to read Teams on a shitty dim low resolution display they somehow sourced from 20 years ago. HR is thoughtful when it comes to this kind of stuff.

I got a temporary ban in memes for saying “OpenAI/MS media alliance goes brrrrr” lmao. “Rule 1.” The OP was yet another post about Google’s crappy AI suggestions and I was implying that the mass beating of that dead horse in article after article was because the media is friendlier to OpenAI and MS in the AI space (kinda the same way Apple gets a free pass in the phone space more often than not for shitty practices and taking credit for inventing features that have existed on Android for years prior). But, even in the absence of clarification (since my quip was just observational and not meant to spark conversation lol), I have no clue how that or a lot of the other things they cite “Rule 1” on could possibly be construed as bigoted - there aren’t enough words to work with in the comment I used as an example, just a barely coherent bit of tongue-in-cheekness. Arbitrariness of enforcement is authoritarian af. I messaged a mod to ask what was up since I didn’t realize modlog was a thing at the time and didn’t hear back (which is fine really). It’s more just the finding out when you go to interact and getting a connectivity error and having to sus out what happened that’s annoying and doesn’t feel conducive to a healthy community.

Getting an automated message in your inbox telling you you’re banned, the length of the ban, and why would be a little more user friendly (though public modlogs are nice) if the goals of the developers are trying to build an inclusive platform. A lot of users aren’t necessarily the type to get a persistent itch when something curious happens, so “figure it out yourself” isn’t a great system. But, if what’s going on over at .ml really is indicative of what the goals of the developers are, it does give me pause about Lemmy as a project and where it will go in the future. As has been mentioned elsewhere, the situation is ripe for the project to be compromised if a dev is compromised and people shouldn’t be sleeping on that. Bad actors injecting seemingly inert exploits into code reviewed by others can happen with any software and fly under the radar, even popular and well trusted FOSS (for reference, see “that time the CIA snuck a backdoor into Notepad++”), so it’s alarming if a group of developers appear to be sympathizers for nationstates that are notoriously privacy hostile.

They will ban you for comments that are so inert it’s impossible to even know what offended them, it’s ridiculous.

I’m aware of how it turned out, but, for the sake of clarity, I was speaking about a month prior to that outcome where the President of South Africa made it clear that he would now allow Putin to be arrested in the event that Putin chose to attend in person. Assuming his statements were straight forward, I even get the logical underpinnings of what he was saying here - it just seems an odd contrast for the SA government to turn around and champion the ICC months later. It’s hard to take a country that recently publicly pragmatized away the need to uphold the legitimacy of ICC authority seriously when they’re now using the ICC as a threat. Another country would be better to lead the charge here on behalf of the ICC.

Setting aside (but stating) my stance that Israel’s policy of collective punishment against innocent Palestinian civilians is completely wrong and thus unconditional support from the US government for Israeli actions is also wrong - South Africa isn’t a good faith actor here.

What was South Africa’s official position last summer, as a signatory to the Rome Statute that established the ICC and thus a nation obligated to arrest those with an ICC arrest warrant that step foot in their territory, about honoring their obligation to execute an arrest on the ICC warrant issued for Putin for war crimes should he step foot in their territory? It almost seems like they’re trying to distract from something or are maybe working towards mutual goals with some other entity (or entities) behind the scenes… Hmm.

*Random mods on some instances, however…

Some mobile clients open the thumbnail version of images. If you instruct your client to open the image in a browser, you’ll see that the url has thumbnail instructions appended to the end and those can be trimmed off of the end to show the full image.