_g0xr

deleted

Deleting a comment doesn't delete it from reddit's backend, only from public view, so reddit still retains and can track and sell your data. Making multiple accounts (assuming one also takes other steps like using a VPN and clearing cookies and local storage) would make it harder for reddit to connect all your comments and build a profile on you.

Downvotes are cancerous, imo. It encourages petty fighting (great for "engagement" metrics) and discourages good faith contributors.

Even upvotes can be an issue. Oh, you wrote your comment the day after the post went up? Too late! Nobody's looking anymore, no upvotes for you. No replies either. You feel your effort has reached nobody and you have wasted your time, so you stop bothering to put in effort.

I think the generality of it pushes topics into "old and inactive" way too fast.

Also, reddit's moderation is terrible. Just look at how long hate subreddits have tended to last even after they started hitting r/all regularly. People who are worth talking to don't tend to hang out anywhere that starts to feel like little nazi camp. Subreddits are separated to an extent, which does help, but that only goes so far.

I think the visual design also discourages longer "wall of text" responses in a way that traditional forums often don't. Lots of things (especially anything nuanced) can't be said in a tweet.

I do think the size that comes from centralization is part of it too. "Communities" feel less community, and posts/discussions are abandoned too fast and almost never revisited (exceptions are posts that come up as the #1 google search result for a tech problem).

The default and r/all subreddits are the worst by miles, though.

But city subreddits and any kind of recommendation thread have been much shittier lately because of the bots and the chatgpt copypasters.

Little forums also have a lot more character in their visual design than reddit, and they tend to allow more customization for individual users too. It's easier to recognize a person behind a regular commenter if they have a big pfp image or a goofy signature.

Yeah. LLMs are great at convincing people they could be amazing, that they're so close to being amazing, if only they just figure out how to bridge that last gap... But that last gap is fundamentally unbridgeable because of the way LLMs work.

It's a very effectively designed human trap, in this and other ways.

Funny how I've only seen people make this kind of claim about AI, and never about people who commission art from artists.

Pope Julius II did not paint the Sistine Chapel's ceilling. Michelangelo did. I cannot believe I have to say this.

Tell that to Kane Parsons (The Backrooms). Or anyone who owns a smartphone. I'd rather watch a million youtube skits where all the actors are played by one person in different wigs than any attempt at passing off AI generated video as big budget special effects.

The animated movie Flow won an Oscar, and that was made by a very small team and entirely in Blender.

Fanvids and AMVs made by clever sampling and splicing have been a thing for a very long time, too.

There are also a lot of games that exclusively use free or self-made assets.

Money allows access to better tools and bigger teams. But replacing artist jobs with AI doesn't seem like a great way for artists to get money (or time to focus on art, for that matter).

Generative AI, especially for video, also keeps getting more expensive, as AI companys' bills finally come due.

A photograph is distinct from a painting. The camera does things a paintbrush cannot, even if given infinite time. (And vice versa, a camera cannot make a painting.)

What can generative AI do that can't be done, and done better, otherwise? Nothing.

It's not an attempt to replace or add an artistic medium; it's an attempt to replace the artist. It doesn't open new avenues of expression, and it has negative journalistic value too.

People who "make AI art" are not making art, nor making anything else. They are commissioning images/videos/text from a bot, just as people commission art from humans. The amount of praise/admiration this deserves is zero.

Spellcheck and autocorrect got considerably worse when people starting replacing its perfectly good backend with LLMs.

I'm not interested in generalising "calls for moral purity" as if all ethical concerns are equivalent.

There is a difference, also, between saying, "I am not morally okay with this, so I am going to do X", vs. "If you don't also do X, you are a Bad Person."

To me, after reading up on the platform of the right-wing party in question and Mullvad's CEO's level of involvement with it, the situation with Mullvad is worse. And because it is a much smaller company, a much greater percentage of my money would go to that CEO in particular. And my choice to pay or not has much more influence on Mullvad than it ever could have on Apple.

Others are free to feel otherwise, and to use their money as they please.

Besides, there are plenty of small company alternatives, like IVPN, which was recommended widely around the time this news broke. And I think that people who found out about Mullvad are likely often the sort to put thought and research into their choice of VPN, rather than just buying NordVPN or whatever based on name recognition only.

A single data point is pretty meaningless. If there were actually data to be found on how the customer base numbers or growth rates of the various VPN companies have or haven't shifted since the news broke, that would be interesting.

Ultimately though, what other people do or don't choose to do is irrelevant to my own choice. Moral purity, as you call it, is impossible. The world is not simple. I am going to do my best to make ethical choices anyway.

Sure. But the political party in question has an explicit goal of rounding up and "deporting" all immigrants and all the children of immigrants (including those who grew up in Sweden and are citizens).

Besides being reprehensible, that kind of mass trafficking requires mass surveillance. It simply can't be done without it.

This kind of surveillance is antithetical to what Mullvad promises.

There of course could be a "privacy for me and my customers, but not for thee" thing in their minds.

But I don't trust that CEO whatsoever, and I don't trust the rest of Mullvad's leadership either because their response to the backlash was mealy mouthed "everyone is entitled to their opinion, let's all be civil" minimization schlock. They didn't give a fuck; they just wanted the PR problem to go away.

Mullvad's VPN service might continue to be trustworthy, but... I have other options. And it could be enshittified over time, just like so many other things. At least one CEO has a motivation to enable mass surveillance.

I'm also just not going to knowingly put money into the hands of someone I know will use it for evil, if and when I have a choice, which in this case I do.

I'm really just here because Google is shit and there are only so many alternative ways to find an aggregation of links to potentially interesting tech articles. I'm hoping to find new blogs or sites to follow, in part so I can stop coming here.

I might give up on it soon though, like I've given up on reddit. Too many junk article lately.

As for my commenting, that's because I, like everyone else here, am a bit of an idiot. HN makes it easy enough to comment that it's hard to resist sometimes.

what even was the point of typing that? it just reads as kindergarten bully on an ipad.

I was unaware that technological progress stopped for everything but LLMs. All other types of technology have achieved their final forms. Wow.

Seriously though, every AI story feels the same lately. There's:

1. company wants or gets more compute 2. IPO 3. AI slop is bad 4. AI company executive says something batshit (often because IPO)

It's gotten pretty boring to read more than the headline for most of these.

I was unaware that technological progress stopped for everything but LLMs. All other types of technology have achieved their final forms. Wow.

Seriously though, every AI story feels the same lately. There's:

1. company wants or gets more compute 2. IPO 3. AI slop is bad 4. AI Company Executive says something batshit (often because IPO)

It's gotten pretty boring to read more than the headline for most of these. It doesn't feel bleeding edge so much as repetitive.