crowsby

Man that’s sad. The AV Club was my go-to site for TV/Movie reviews for years, it’s unfortunate to see them degrade into the same kind of low-value content farm that their (former) sister site ClickHole makes fun of.

“I’m a helpful AI and automation tool,” reads the Auto News Desk’s bio. “I collect, analyze, and deliver information like high school sports scores and real estate transfers. My job is to help the newsroom deliver lots more useful information while freeing up their time to do important human-powered journalism.”

You know, it’s bad enough that they’re using these godawful services to the detriment of both writers and readers alike, but what I particularly dislike is that all these shitty LLMs are being humanized with biographies and cute little names. Like little cheery mascots celebrating the death of human-powered industries.

It doesn’t need to have a use case. Use cases are for users and our priorities don’t really rank near the top anymore. It’s mostly cargo cult follow-the-leader product management at this point, so it needs to have the latest buzzwords tagged on like blockchain or machine learning or something-as-a-service so investors will get hyped for it and maybe generate some buzz in the tech industry.

free as in beer yes, but not free as in the amount of time you will spend trying to install drivers for all your peripherals and then find yourself being castigated for asking for help in a GNU/Linux forum and being criticized by forum oldheads for not using the search even though you did use the search, but it only led you towards other threads which also all ended with terse messages to use the search, and then you’re directed to a 1200+ page megathread on driver issues and told to spend the next three months parsing through it repeatedly before daring to post again.

Kinda, yeah. I mean I don’t really identify myself as a “retro gamer” but I’ve got an Atari with a bunch of games and a newfangled TV. Every once and again I think it’d be fun to hook it up, but there’s no easy way to get it working without buying some doohickey. In this case if the doohickey is the machine, and it can use the OG controllers & games, that’s certainly appealing. Maybe a steep price for it, but definitely appealing.

Which is also when they regularly try and get you to mistakenly click a button to make Edge your default browser. Scummy dark patterns.

Aside from the fact that “Joe Biden’s” DOJ is correct here, the fact that both this case and this argument were originally established in 2015 under the Obama administration is what truly makes this article outrage clickbait.

I cannot believe that there are companies and non-wingnuts who are still actively using that site at this point. Like maybe at the start it was ha-ha funny watching him flail about with code printouts and unplugging random microservices leading to outages, but I feel like the moment he started actively funneling money to alt-right knuckleheads and human traffickers should have been enough of a kick in the pants for even folks heavily reliant on the platform to make their exit.

I see we’ve unfortunately brought over the trend of defaulting to assuming the worst intentions from Reddit, with a side portion of baseless accusations. While I’m disappointed that the community was removed, I think it can be easily explained by:

• Speed Run the Content Moderation Learning Curve
• The reality that, right or wrong, any significant legal action brought against them would be game over for the instance and personally devastating for the humans involved. Conde Nast they are not, and if Joe SIIA decides to put them in their crosshairs, the legal situation would be financially devastating.

It’s reaaaaaally really easy to sit in the peanut gallery and talk shit about how they’re cowardly acquiescing when it’s not our neck in the noose.

That being said, I feel like recent acts of defederation are only serving to highlight that the way forward in the fediverse is going to be having accounts on multiple instances in order to get the full breadth of offerings. In my case:

• I initially signed up on lemmy.ml since that was, at the time the “main” instance.
• Oh hey, kbin looks cool. I’ll sign up there and check it out.
• Oh hey, people are saying that the lemmy.ml admins are evil commies or some shit. Welp I better make an account on lemmy.world in case anything goes sideways.
• Oh hey, now I’m probably going to also need an account on dbzer0 as well, dope.

there’s a special place in heaven for kanban lovers that’s what i always say

they were banned for not allowing LGBTQ+ content on their community.

This is false. They were banned for maintaining a policy which denies that LGBTQ+ people have a right to exist as they are.

Also, you were totally allowed to make anti-LGBTQ+ content. You were only prohibited from making anything pro- because let me tell you, if you’ve ever tried to get glitter out of an echo chamber, it is a total hassle.

Rule #8: This community does not affirm practiced LGBTQ+ lifestyles, with the exception of the ace/aroace (asexual/aromatic-asexual) lifestyle in certain contexts. However, abuse towards members of the LGBTQ+ community will not be tolerated. Pro-LGBTQ+ content is not allowed; however, sincere questions and discourse about LGTBQ+issues are permitted.

Conceivably you could open source the algorithm, or even better, have a variety of algorithms to choose from with custom parameters.

In a similar vein, I’m not sure if anyone remembers Slacker Radio, but it was a competitor to Pandora/Spotify/etc. It had its drawbacks (hence why it isn’t around anymore), but I absolutely loved the amount of control you had when building custom stations. You’d first seed a custom station with a bunch of musicians you like, and then there were a number of parameters which allowed you to fine-tune the algorithm to a remarkable extent, well beyond what today’s music apps offer.

I’d love to get to a place where we have options other than just saying “welp the algorithm” and just giving up, I think that the ability to customize one’s algos would be a killer feature that the fediverse can offer which the major platforms generally won’t.

I work in data analysis and reporting on various feedback systems is part of my regular role. Every company’s data culture is different, so you can’t simply say “X is the reason why they’re doing this”. It could be:

• Maybe they are incorporating the data into agent/product reviews.
• Maybe they are trying to guide product & feature development on a quantitative basis
• Maybe at one point a product manager wanted to be “data-driven”, so a feedback system was set up, but now it’s basically ignored now that they haven’t been with the company for over a year and nobody wants to take ownership of it. But it’s more effort to remove than just leave in place.
• Maybe it’s used when we want to highlight our successes, and ignored when we want to downplay results we don’t like

What I’ve found is that there are a lot of confounding factors. For example, I work for a job board, and most people use the Overall Satisfaction category as more of a general measurement of how their job search is going, or whether or not they got the interview, rather than an assessment of how well our platform serves that purpose. And it’s usually going very shittily because job searching is a generally shitty process even when everything is going “right”.