VelesDude

I would consider myself a Stallmanite, I guess. I use a fully 100% Libre software stack/OS/Firmware where possible - but Libre JS was just a little too unusable too me. When you are running a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo - it runs SLOW!

Complete aside, check out that Sharp A521! Nowadays that is verging on cyberdeck territory.

Franklin would also be puzzled that there would be many people that are nutrient deficient despite calorie abundance.

There are a few acquaintance over the years that have been involved in various sectors of social media and various 3 letter government agencies. The one thing they have always said is, just assume they doing to most morally questionable things to get data - they just won't public admit until it is absolutely vital to do so.

Slightly off topic but I did like one of them being so frank about Linux and open source. They worked for a while with the NSA, all they said was "Linux has 100 million lines of code. You have to fooling your self to think we didn't slip in hundreds of backdoors onto that thing". The same can be said of almost any other system though.

I have long suspected that the gaslighting thing of "it is just subconscious coincidence" is just a very neat cover for these things. There might be a slight influence but it is nowhere near as powerful an effect as they would like you to think. With advertising swaying people, they can move a few percent of people a few percent in one direction but it doesn't really target individuals effectively in guaranteeing results. Only as an aggregate.

Yep, did the same thing with "Smoked Salmon". I went a step further and decided on this without speaking it about 2 months in advance so that I can get a clear baseline on ads I was getting.

On talking lovingly about smoked salmon, it took 2 days for it to turn up.

I have also seen it happen with folks talking about Jeep for instance.

This is one of those things that I agree with the ideas behind it. Free Libre software and all of that BUT in trying to deal with this via a web addon considering the scale of, the internet, It feels like there is no way this could ever achieve its goals. I mean how much JS out there doesn't even have a license explicitly defined on run time?

And when you run it that is exactly what happens. It assumes the worst and the vast majority of things do not work. All it really does is slow your browser down to an absolute crawl as it tries to do its thing. I just ended up with Noscript and making a few exceptions where needed. It is a much better middle ground than this.

I wonder if they would have gone down the path of many bands in the late 60s and have those long spoken word poetry stretches. That said, thanks to things like that I do love how often you see Michael Moorecocks name popping up.

I ask myself the same thing almost everyday and then that one really cool thing comes along. Yep pretty much mental gambling in the same way other social media is. I got rid of all of that, HN is my last hold out for now.

That is the big question with LLM's. How can we tell what is being fed in is original content or just the output fed back in like a recursive fractal?

When you see numbers it does make you wonder if the premise the Subprime Attention Crisis (Tim Hwang) is much more realistic than we think.

But when you think about the amount of industries advertising covers, it might still be tame. Hard to tell from the outside and even the inside on this until it is in the rear view mirror.

Yeah, some poor phrasing on my behalf.

I do hope that those working in these companies actually building the tools do care. But unfortunately, it seems that corruption is an emergent property of complexity.

If there is any dishonesty, I would wager it is a case of it can double the battery life in low power scenarios. Can go twice as long when doing word processing for instance. Can potentially idle a lot lower

I think it was Paul Thurrott on Windows Weekly podcast who said that all these companies don't really care about privacy. Apple takes billions of dollar a year to direct data towards Google via the search defaults. Clearly privacy has a price. And I suspect it will only get worse with time as they keep chasing the next quarter.

Tim Cook unfortunately is so captured in that quarterly mindset of 'please the share holders' that it is only a matter of time.

* rolls up newspaper * * bops on nose * No! Bad dad joke! Don't do that!