Jul (they/she)

The Netflix user interface has become a mess to navigate, and mostly only ever shows me things I’ve already watched. If they’d put even a tiny bit of the effort they’re putting into driving people to watch certain content they produced or are paid to promote and their ad framework into making it possible to find new content and improving the content they do produce (damn the “AI”-based effects and skin smoothing nonsense and shitty writing in the second season of Wednesday pissed me off), I might be willing to stick around but at this point I’ve rarely been using it anymore. Sad to see the fall…

That goes for most industries. No need to protect your reputation or be ethical in a monopoly or even really in a duopoly. End-stage capitalism consolidation at its finest.

I mean it is a similar intent to a warrant canary, though more active. What they should have done is make sure all of the data is stored in their country if it’s that sensitive or use only products that allow full encryption and don’t store much metadata. There are ways to do these things if you aren’t lazy and actually hire an experienced architect (I’m one for example).

This was definitely much more of a legal overstep with explicit intent to subvert court orders than a warrant canary, though, and this unethical in it’s implementation if only questionable in its intent. However, the fact that the secretive orders exist in the first place and are not done just in cases where lives or true national security are at stake and only for limited amounts of time before being disclosed or something like that as most were originally intended outside of nations with fascist-leaning administrations like the US, China, India, etc., is the real issue and the reason for both this and warrant canaries to be necessary even if it wasn’t a fascist leaning administration doing it for possibly malicious reasons.

I’d hope so considering the current US administration is friendly with multiple people they have charged and issued warrants for such things as crimes against humanity and genocide. And the US has access to Microsoft data which likely includes all documents stored in any Office cloud products.

I mean probably true, but that shouldn’t stop them from being liable if ordinary individuals are liable for the same actions. Sure, punish your employees, but if a parent is responsible to pay for a child’s pirating then an employer should be just as responsible for paying for an employee’s pirating.

Yeah, but this will not require any people to add content since it’s all stollen and simply manipulated which is easier to automate than producing original content which AI can’t be trusted not to hallucinate about quite yet. The idea is to then get the search engine AIs to point there as much as possible as it will likely be optimized for AI scraping rather than human browsing. Then since the AI results are prioritized more and more, they can get their truthiness to be what people see over actual reality.

Nah, the only thing the old analog 625-line resolutions looked OK on were things like my small bedroom TV in the 90s (though the refresh rates are major improvements in some media). The smaller living room TVs look way better with 720p and regular sized modern living room TVs are significantly better at 1080p. (Note that 4:3 ratio TVs had smaller advertised inch sizes than similarly sized 16:9 ratio TVs since they’re measured diagonally so I’ll avoid using actual sizes since they aren’t comparable.)

Depends on the physical size of the screen. Which is why mostly only wealthy people with 90-inch+ screens really have ever cared about 8K. 4K is a noticeable improvement on a 60 or 70 inch screen, but the extra cost of content isn’t anywhere near being worth it for most people.

Because the random alterations create variations that allow survival of the species, not the individual, in changing conditions. For an example of what happens without that, just look at bananas. Without any evolution through DNA alteration during procreation, a single disease van wipe them out across the globe. Happened once and the current strain is being wiped out by disease, though more slowly due to human intervention, as we speak.

Sounds like a good way to impersonate and use the reputation of someone who’s active on other platforms. Just like the “verified” stuff mostly just means you paid, not that your identity was verified which is always confusing people who aren’t careful, often used/confused by right-wing “news”.

It’s nice to have a GUI for those things sometimes rather than a command line for everything. If you’re doing things right, your daily login shouldn’t have access to modify system settings or read sensitive logs. But troubleshooting requires that often and ls, vim, cat, tail, etc., can become cumbersome compared to a GUI file manager and proper GUI text editor like Kate or Gedit.

That future might not be far off considering what Trump did today. Balance of power is seriously about to shift.

Yeah, but this will make it much easier and using much better algorithms to make it more realistic because OpenAI will start profiting off of it and devoting resources to it which they have way more of than the existing systems.

That’s going to be a disaster. It’s going to overly reinforce toxic sex understanding due to lack of sexual education. Most porn already does that, but is limited by what a human body can actually perform. AI will be able to make what is essentially sexual torture look like it’s what someone should normally expect sex to be like and make it look like the recipient is enjoying it…among many other issues.

Despite living with one arm, Jess doesn’t see herself as disabled, saying the barriers she faces are societal.

Actually, this is what disability is all about. It’s not that people can’t complete tasks or take care of themselves, it’s that society doesn’t provide the same tools to disabled people that they provide to so called “able bodied” people to allow them to complete those tasks.

It’s the trope of the single grocery store that everyone goes to, but the person in a wheelchair, but otherwise able, can’t use because there’s a curb. So, suddenly they can’t feed themselves. It’s not that they are unable to feed themselves, it’s that they can’t access the food without assistance and thus are “disabled”. As soon as a ramp is installed they are no longer “disabled”, just differently abled.

On the way to the world of “Carole and Tuesday” where all music is composed by AI and owned by big corporations, so it becomes nearly impossible for a small artist to enter the market. And that show didn’t even really cover how now literally every chord that is pleasant to human ears can be not only copyrighted, but they’ll know exactly what songs and how to sue every single independent artist for copyright infringement and it will be totally legal if not very ethical. There will be no legal songs outside of one or two corporations.

It was promising for a while, better quality streams, better payments to artists, etc. But they never ended up implementing stuff they promised like better integration with devices or improving their catalog.

It would reduce their short term revenue, but would improve their long-term revenue. Netflix used to have a great product, but they fiddled with it to make people watch only certain content that brings them more revenue. Same with Spotify. This then reduces the number of people willing to pay for the service and since there are few competitors that are better and/or have as much content they “piracy” is the only way to get the content you want for a reasonable price, with a good user experience.

So short term these things improve revenue, but not as much as the revenue lost in the long term as people start to dislike the the poor experience or are unable to afford the higher prices. And people don’t want multiple services to have to check for new content all the time all with different poor Ux.

All valuable data should be backed up off site in “cold storage” type places. It’s not that expensive compared to the production storage.

It’s been used as an excuse to lay off people, but not the real reason. They were looking at ways to short term boost stock prices since stock buy backs caused their stock prices to increase, but that boost is fading, they needed another artificial boost to profit to maintain those stock prices.