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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 12th, 2023

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  • It’s funny to me that people have such a problem with YouTube Premium. There are a LOT of reasons to criticize YouTube/Google, but YouTube Premium is about as close as it gets to the platonic ideal of a video subscription service. It completely banishes any ads you’d get without paying, and it provides the creators you watch with more value than someone watching without premium. If showing ads is unacceptable, and paying to not see ads is unacceptable, then what’s the alternative? People have to make a living, and servers don’t run on magic.




  • Technology has been solving problems people don’t have since… Always. No one had a problem listening to music from an 8 track tape, but that technology still died and we moved on. The truth is that an increasing majority of consumers either don’t care or even prefer wireless headphones. If you consider not having a headphone jack a deal breaker, then you’re not the market most phone manufacturers are after. Sorry to break it to you. Good news though, there are still several smartphone models that have a headphone jack. Buy one of those. Or get whatever phone you want and get a $5 adapter. Or just sit on the internet seething every time a new phone comes out without an increasingly niche feature. Up to you.


  • I kind of can’t believe we’re still having this conversation. It’s ridiculously cheap and easy to use wired earbuds with a modern phone if you want to. I got it back when it was just iPhones and Apple was selling lighting to 3.5 adapters for like $7k, but that’s obviously not the case anymore. If someone wants to hold on to their 5+ year old phone and run it dead, that’s great. More power to them. Doing it to avoid getting a phone with no headphone jack is a little silly at this point, though.



  • I switched to buckwheat pillows a few years ago and I’ve been a fan. It’s a really interesting texture that you can move and shape really easily, but then when you apply pressure to it, it firms up and holds its shape. So, you get a really supportive pillow that’s molded to your head and neck (For reference, I’m a side sleeper). The only downside I’ve noticed is the filling degrades relatively quickly, and after about a year it loses a lot of its volume and doesn’t hold its shape as well, so you’ll need to replace it. The bright side is that it’s fairly cheap, and entirely biodegradable.





  • it also means the need for societal shift to support people outside of capitalism is needed.

    Exactly. This is why I think arguing about whether AI is stealing content from human artists isn’t productive. There’s no logical argument you can really make that a theft is happening. It’s a foregone conclusion.

    Instead, we need to start thinking about what a world looks like where a large portion of commercially viable art doesn’t require a human to make it. Or, for that matter, what does a world look like where most jobs don’t require a human to do them? There are so many more pressing and more interesting conversations we could be having about AI, but instead we keep circling around this fundamental misunderstanding of what the technology is.


  • I can definitely see why OpenAI is controversial. I don’t think you can argue that they didn’t do an immediate heel turn on their mission statement once they realized how much money they could make. But they’re not the only player in town. There are many open source models out there that can be run by anyone on varying levels of hardware.

    As far as “stealing,” I feel like people imagine GPT sitting on top of this massive collection of data and acting like a glorified search engine, just sifting through that data and handing you stuff it found that sounds like what you want, which isn’t the case. The real process is, intentionally, similar to how humans learn things. So, if you ask it for something that it’s seen before, especially if it’s seen it many times, it’s going to know what you’re talking about, even if it doesn’t have access to the real thing. That, combined with the fact that the models are trained to be as helpful as they possibly can be, means that if you tell it to plagiarize something, intentionally or not, it probably will. But, if we condemned any tool that’s capable of plagiarism without acknowledging that they’re also helpful in the creation process, we’d still be living in caves drawing stick figures on the walls.