When it comes to dealing with advertisements when they’re surfing on their browsers. I’ve just learned recently about how Google has or is killing UBlock Origin on the Chrome browser as well as all Chromium based browsers too.
We’ve heard for years about people complaining, bitching, whining and vice versa about how they keep seeing ads. And those trying to help them, keep wasting time to tell these people that they’re surfing without extensions. Whether it’d be on Chrome or Firefox or another browser.
By this point, I’ve long stopped being that helper because if you cared at all about the advertisements you see, you would’ve long had gotten on the wagon of getting adblockers by now. You bring this onto yourself.
The importance of digital privacy and freedom. The way capitalism ruins everything you like.
Worked at a major tech company as a data engineer, constantly warn everybody that major tech company is doing crazy surveillance, nobody cares. Told everybody my job was taking economists and research scientists python models, translating them into production code for data pipelines that would operate on terabytes of streaming data and it would change our recommendation system on the fly to keep you on the page. It was designed by academics to prey on basic human instincts. Tons more sketchy stuff, but I always felt like that was the most predatory. All we need to know was your zip code and gender and we knew how to recommend you stuff you wanted, and then people would voluntarily give us more identifying information.
Seems nobody will ever put sanity and social safety over their feelings. People don’t really understand the social contact anymore. They think that’s for everyone else.
I wish it was acceptable to call older folks out as lazy if they refuse to learn how to text, email and otherwise use the internet. It’s fine for them to call millennials lazy if they can’t drive a stick shift or balance a checkbook, but if you’re giving me bullshit like “I’m 68 years old, I don’t text and I don’t email” you are just a lazy, stubborn bastard. I’ve met plenty of 90 year olds who are perfectly capable because they aren’t lazy old fucks.
Seriously, of all people they’re the ones that have been around since the internet’s inception. They’ve had more time to adapt than anyone.
That the covid pandemic is still going full tilt and still demands a very aggressive worldwide response.
Everybody (over the age of 4–they were born in 2020!) knows it, they just deny it like crazy because they don’t have the balls to deal with how unpleasant it is.
Which makes it infinitely more unpleasant because we aren’t lifting the weight together. But anybody still denying the pandemic is consciously deciding to do it, and an explanation isn’t going to make them un-decide, because it’s not a lack of knowledge.
Is it still full tilt?
Looking at CDC graphs of excess deaths, it appears we’re back at baseline. That is, assuming I’m reading this correctly which is very much not a sure thing.
Influenza typically accounts for 1.5% of deaths at its peak every year. Covid has been hovering around 3%. So it’s currently about the same level as a bad flu season. To me this indicates endemic levels. If there is a strain that suddenly starts killing more people, it will make headlines. I’m not trying to be in denial, this is just where I’m at. I’ve had it, and my immune system is doing what it is supposed to do. I’m not worried about contracting it again, unless the a new deadly strain comes out.
Before calling support, turning your device off and back on again will legitimately resolve 90% of your issues.
If you call the helldesk and the uptime of your device is more than 24 hours and you said you already rebooted it how can we trust anything else you say?
Because I rebooted it last week and still had the problem last week after rebooting and I was lazy about making a ticket.
tbf, I have rebooted my system and uptime didn’t also reset. It appears that newer Windows has this “fast startup” feature. Pinky swear I told the truth.
Any proper it system will have that turned off because fast boot only applies to devices with spinning disks. If you have a SSD as your boot device there is no advantage to it.
You are correct. However, I don’t mess with my work computer and let the IT department manage it. Sometimes, they manage poorly.
Any proper it system
No True Scotsman would ever enable such a feature!
Almost any support position to do with phones is horrible to help people with. No one wants to turn it off. No one wants to understand their bill. No one accepts how data is used. No one thinks they need to pay for their devices. It’s a vast landscape of ignorance and entitlement.
Now, conversely, if you work in support, please ACTUALLY FUCKING LISTEN TO ME when I am telling you I’ve already done that 17 different ways, along with tons of other troubleshooting and isolating and I’m not a technical moron and I tried every possibility to avoid calling you so can we PLEASE SKIP THE USUAL BULLSHIT SUGGESTIONS?!?!?!?!
Honestly, they can’t. The way IT works is there’s multiple levels. First level, second level, third level. Whenever anybody calls in, they get first level, which are usually either inexperienced people, new people, or people with no experience whatsoever, and they’re all reading scripts. They’re the gatekeepers for level 2, 3, and 4, the people who actually know what they’re doing. It’s because 99 out of 100 people don’t know shit and it just needs to be restarted and they would clog up the time of people who actually know what they’re doing and nothing would ever get done.
And if one of those level one guys accidentally lets through somebody who should have been taken care of by their script, they will get reamed the fuck out for wasting people’s time who gets paid more an hour than they do a day.
That’s the difference from a good support tech and a bad one tbh. Bring able to gauge someone’s tech literacy and taking in all troubleshooting done before is literally the first thing you should do. So many escalations I’ve received just has “had user reboot, had them disconnect and reconnect to network. Checked and device has no pending updates, sending to L3.” in the notes. Half of the time a reboot really wouldn’t do anything, and they really just needed to be added to an AD group (most of my tickets last week). I’m just glad I’m shifting out of support and more into projects.
I hate it too but they don’t because everyone claims they know what they’re doing and they’ve already tried all that stuff.
99% of the time it turns out they haven’t and that was the problem.
If I was support, had a list to work through because my calls were monitored and recorded, and you were being a complete know-it-all asshole, I would walk through them as slow as possible, and repeat as many as I could plausibly get away with.
Because that’s the actual job: following instructions from their boss, which means following their processes. Why would they deviate from that, and risk their job, for someone who’s rude, and/or self-important?
As someone who’s also technically competent and rarely calls support, when I do, I’ve never had to repeat the same steps 17 times, or even 3 times.
I let them tell me to turn off and on again, confirm it’s done, explain why I need a level 2 support or escalation. Then they’ll typically ask me one or two more questions, which I’ll politely answer, reiterate my polite request for level 2, and they will escalate for me.
When you’re at a fast food drive thru and they offer to round up for a charity cause, YOU can claim that write-off donation on your taxes, not the restaurant. Of course virtually nobody would do that unless you save your receipts and tally them up next year… but you can!
I never thought about that, but it makes sense
Related, I tire of explaining tax deductions are over valued. It’s a net loss to you to spend money on something deductable and claim the deduction. If you have $100, the government takes $20 and you get $80. If you give that $100 to charity, you have $0, the government gets $0, and the charity has $100.
Deductions are only good if you value the thing that the money went to.
I thought you couldn’t even write off charity unless it was some stupidly high amount. Last time I looked into it, it basically just seemed like a tax grift for rich people
You only get a percentage, depending on your state. It’s not much… not many people bother (big market for boomers lol)
You need to have enough to make it worthwhile over the standard deduction. That’s 14.6k in donations, mortgage interest, state taxes paid, and other things like that.
I think it’s because for most people the standard deduction is way higher than itemized.
Grammar.
I’m not a fan of people enthusiastically turning the written language into gibberish and hiding behind “it’s enough to be understood.”
I don’t fucking understand you, idiot.
That there are AI art generators that use licensed art and/or public domain and open licence images. People so deep in the “AI art is theft” shtick they don’t even wanna hear it.
Reading more than a headline.
Actually two things:
First: Capitalism is bad. It gets so bad it will destroy people the worst way: both mentally and physically. And it will destroy our planet more sooner than later. We need to get rid of „the rich“, switch to a social stable System and actually care about our environment (aka climate) immediately to stop the worst. It is already way too late to stop the catastrophe entirely, but some of us still can survive.
Second: Voting for faschist and racist parties will hurt you badly. They don‘t want what’s best for the common people, they want power.
I wish we fucking lived longer so the people who doomed our planet would be alive when it starts burning. I hate that their selfishness will go completely unpunished, and that they get to die happy and comfortable in their beds after sentencing billions to death.
nothing. absolutely nothing. if ppl would wanna know they’d ask. let them use facebook, iphone, crude oil and whatever floats their boat. all tipping points have been reached. no need to stress anyone anymore.
Tipping point is the wrong word, because after a certain point it’s tipping and you can’t stop it. There are a few ways that applies, but it very much does not describe the whole situation.
Climate change is a dial on a stove and we’re still cranking it.
“You’ve chosen the wrong phone” is peak lemmy.
Second only to “ditch Windows, use Linux. I don’t care about your use case”.
Looks at Republican party
The dangers of conservatism/fascism.
If not for conservatism, humans would be proactively addressing global heating. Conservatives oppress the innocent and vulnerable in every country where conservatives have power. If not for conservatism, there would be no genocide. Conservatives are the gullible, deadly foot-soldiers of the billionaires.
Conservatism is the single biggest threat to life on earth. Eradicating conservatism would be the single most positive change we could make to preserve life on earth.
That AI safety is much more important than AI hurting copyright or artists.
I say this because the “AI sucks haha” and “AI just steals” retoric is very harmful to AI safety movement as people just don’t believe AGI or even close-to-AGI will be capable enough to harm our society.
Currently many estimate that there’s 1-20% chance that AGI could end our civilization. So fuck the copyright and fuck the artists when we’re looking at ods like this we need to start preparing now even if it’s 10 years away.
But alas, nobody can’t think further out than the length of their nose and honestly I’m just hoping we’re lucky enough to be in that 80% because clearly we’re not going to do anything about it.
That would require an actual AGI to emerge, which it has not and is not going to. LLMs are fancy text prediction tools and little more.
Are you assuming LLMs are the only way humans could ever try making an AGI? If so, why do you assume that?
There’s more important shit than worrying about if an unproven sci fi concept will come to being any time soon.
Yeah, agreed. That’s not what I asked though.
This response is a bit of a misdirection since we all discuss shit that isn’t the most important all the time.
I agree that AGI is dangerous but I don’t see LLMs as evidence that we’re close to AGI, I think they should be treated as separate issues.
Given what I think I know about LLMs, I agree. I don’t think they’re the path to AGI.
The person I replied to said AGI was never going to emerge.
I had meant to say AGI would never emerge from our current attempts at creating them.
What we see in AI as an average consumer is like the RC hotwheels to a state of the art tank being used by big corps.
Just imagine that if an early LLM can fool an engineer into thinking it’s sentient, what a state of the art system can do, one designed to predict the market, run propaganda bots on social media or straight up manufacture news stories with the footage to back it up.
The AI being used by big corporations is so advanced, it’s one of the reasons countries have been trying to digitally isolate themselves. It’s really not an if, it’s a when.
I’m not sure you understand what AGI is, and why we’re not going to invent it any time soon.
I do. I did get a little lost in the weeds with my point though, as I was talking in a more general sense about how AI is already powerful and dangerous - because AI safety is a subject in this thread.
The “AI” being used by big corporations is still fundamentally an LLM and has all the flaws of an LLM. It’s not a hot wheels car vs a tank, it’s a hot wheels car vs a $2 billion RC car
AI safety is definitely an important thing but when you follow it up with “AGI could end our civilization” you lose me.
It sounds hyperbolic but if you assume it will reach human-level intelligence and will have the ability to update its own code, you very quickly have something much smarter than us. Whether it will want to help or hurt us is an unknown. Whether we can control something that’s smarter than us (and getting smarter every second) is unlikely, IMO.
I’ll likely always point it out, but I’m surprised at how few people are willing to understand how to consider a conflict resolved.
Imagine for a moment, you’re sitting in a courtroom. You appear before the judge. You sit down. An officer whispers maybe three highly accusatory sentences in the judge’s ear about things that have long been dealt with. Without you saying a word, and without a few minutes having gone by, the judge sentences you to practice forced disappearance or face annihilation in some form. So many times I’ve faced people who you’d think believe this to be how the journey from point A to point Z is expected to play out in addressing issues, in all spheres of life, complete with a direct rejection of nuance/elaboration, and it has made me wonder if humanity really is inherently evil, for a lack of a better word.
I’m having an aneurysm trying to understand what’s being said here, can anyone explain?
Glad I’m not the only one. I read it 3 times and still don’t know what’s being said.
Maybe don’t take it in all at once. Separate everything into parts based on where a comma would be. And also realize that “due process” is one word. I am genuinely confused at how it’s hard to understand.
I’m trying to understand your conclusion, it feels like you have contempt for humanity because of their inability to tell when a conflict is resolved?
