Of course not. There’s glory, there’s internal CCP politics, pooh bear’s ego, claims over the South China Sea, reducing the US sphere of influence, the fulfilled narrative of a “united China”, etc.
China doesn’t stand to gain anything pragmatic by invading Taiwan. However humans, and dictators in particular, do not always act perfectly rationally and in the best interest of their nation.
There is without a doubt a connection to ScarJo. They asked her to voice the AI, they asked her again right before release, and the CEO tweeted “her” on release.
The only question is whether, backlash aside, they could technically get away with it (which does not make it right).
There is almost certainly internal communication that basically reads “hey let’s get an actress who sounds as close to ScarJo as possible”. There’s also the CEO tweeting “her” on the day of release.
Is that legal? IANAL, but OpenAI’s reaction of immediately shutting that shit down leads me to believe they realized it is, in fact, illegal.
Your comparison is also incorrect. You’re not getting a JEJ soundalike, you’re getting a JEJ soundalike to do a Darth Vader impersonation. Meaningfully different semantics. They don’t just want “white american woman who vaguely sounds like ScarJo I guess” they have proven beyond doubt that they want “The AI from the 2013 movie Her starring Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson”.
Also legality aside, it’s really fucking weird and ethically wrong. I don’t care if it’s legal or not, you shouldn’t be able to make an AI replicate someone’s voice without their consent.
New notification, old notification, either way it auto-dismisses the system notification after 5 seconds. Why? I guess they don’t trust the DE to manage notifications properly??
So my colleagues know if they send me a message I’ll get to it when I’ll get to it because I probably will have missed the notification.
So you’ve never once in your life bought a laptop or prebuilt PC, used or otherwise? Because if you have then you’ve paid the Windows Tax.
I know Brave browser has had a lot of controversy in the past regarding their business practices, including rolling out their own crypto-coin.
They apparently make the really bold claim of using their own index exclusively. If true (given their track record I am not 100 % willing to accept that as truth without seeing some independent analysis), that would do wonders for the search ecosystem. I’m definitely interested to see how it pans out.
Wow, looks like they just updated that page and removed all references to their external indexes. Very shady stuff, Kagi. I’d go as far as to say they are now lying by omission.
The archived version of that page from March does open with (emphasis mine):
Our data includes anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Mojeek and Yandex, specialized search engines like Marginalia, and sources of vertical information like Apple, Wikipedia, Open Meteo, and other APIs.
Then it goes on to say:
Kagi’s indexes provide unique results that help you discover non-commercial websites and “small web” discussions surrounding a particular topic.
Now reading between the lines, and more importantly knowing how much sheer capital goes into indexing the entire web, I can say with much certainty that Kagi is probably powered mostly by Google since it and Bing (which they aren’t using) are basically the only meaningful players in the space. Yandex is for the Russosphere, and Mojeek is nice but nowhere even close to Google or Bing’s coverage. By their own admission Teclis is more narrowly focused and not meant to replace Google’s index. So I’m going to go ahead and call them big fat liars.
I wouldn’t even care that Google is their main index, that’s fine and they can’t be expected to compete with the billions of dollars Google spends on indexing. But the lack of transparency and shady business practices are a big turn-off for me.
Kagi is just Google’s index with fancy features and filtering on top. They include a few other sources but for regular search it’s almost always going to be Google’s index providing the base results.
They already are! Some young artists are already doing those 2000s nostalgia CD releases for the kicks of having a physical medium.
However a big part of the marketing for vinyl has historically been “the sound is warm/high definition/whatever audiophile bullshit”. Anyone can achieve the same “warmth” with an EQ and some crackle/white noise (it works so well it’s a whole genre called lofi…), but the “vinyl sounds better” crowd will make the unfalsifiable claim that “it’s not the same”.
However, good luck claiming that “CDs sound different from FLACs”!
In the end both vinyl and CD enjoyers are doing the same thing: enjoying music through personal and ritualistic manipulation of physical objects, that also come with nice album art. It’s just that some vinyl enjoyers are attributing some of that enjoyment to a largely made-up supposed “superiority” of sound (yes there are edge cases like “bad” remasters of songs originally released on vinyl, but is that really why anyone buys a turntable? Be honest.).
Yet another day where I get to use the “sound cleverer than I am” cheat code by just randomly inserting French words in my English.
It’s not. You have the “explore” tab which is more like “today’s viral toots” (which tend to be a lot more varied than Lemmy’s “All/Top 24h” since Lemmy is a link aggregator and doesn’t really lend itself to jotting down thoughts or diatribes), and you have your personal timeline which is people you actively follow. It’s not a cafeteria, it’s your RSS feed.
Where it gets shouty is in replies, especially as those get federated weirdly. But that’s only a problem for the few percent of users who are making content, not for consumers.
At that point he’d outed himself as an asshole to the general public, but he still got big results with SpaceX and Tesla. That incident could have been lost to time and a legacy of undeniable successes.
Hyperloop is where things went cuckoo-bananas business-wise IMO. The delays and broken promises at Tesla were weird, but anyone who’d heard of subways could tell the whole hyperloop thing was doomed to fail, and it became increasingly obvious to anyone who read tech headlines that he wasn’t just any asshole, but a clueless asshole.
“Because safety isn’t a thing we can measure” reads exactly like a dril tweet.
… holy shit there’s a whole academic-level analysis of dril’s tweets. I am enchanted.
They’re the fuckers who almost turned OF into Pinterest as well? Not surprising in retrospect. The crazy thing is how all news outlets ran with the narrative and payment processors are so flaky with adult content. De-platforming sex work shouldn’t be this easy.
Eeeeeeeh. There’s nuance.
IIRC there were only a handful of verified CSAM videos on the entire website. It’s inevitable, it happens everywhere with UGC, including on here. Anecdotally, in the years leading up to the purge PH had already cleaned up its act and from what I saw pirated content was rather well moderated. However this time the media made a huge stink about the alleged CSAM, payment processors threatened to pull out (they are notoriously very puritan, it’s caused a lot of trouble to lemmynsfw’s admins for instance) and so regardless of the validity of the initial claims PH had to do something to gain back the trust of payment processors, so they basically nuked every video that did not have a government ID attached.
Now if I may speculate a little, one of the reasons it happened this way is probably that due to its industry position PH is way better moderated than most (if not all) websites of their size and already had verified a bunch of its creators. At the same time the rise of OnlyFans and similar websites means that real amateur content has all but disappeared so there was less and less reason to allow random UGC anyway. So the high moderation costs probably didn’t make much sense anymore anyway.
Anyone who stills sells a conventional stove in 2024 needs to be jailed. Induction is so damn cheap now (229 € entry-level fullsize at IKEA) and better in every way that trying to sell a resistive stove else is just a scam.
Oof, sounds like a nightmare. I have an IKEA induction stove and it’s literally just four sliders that you click where you want the heat to be. 100% power is at the right of the slider. There are a couple other buttons (multi-zone heating, timer, etc.), but you don’t strictly need them.
So it’s way less frustrating and I guess a bit more accessible for people with bad eyesight, but for people with zero eyesight it still doesn’t work.
The only induction stoves with physical knobs I saw online were several grand. Maybe there’s business to be made by selling “touch-to-physical” conversion kits for appliances… Or I guess bumpy decals would work as well.
quiet apartment complexes
Property developers will do literally anything but invest 2 €/m² in decent sound insulation. What the hell.
Soundproofing should be just as mandatory as fireproofing, it’s such a stupid problem to be having and it’s one of the main drivers causing people to flee to single family homes which is a whole environmental and socioeconomic catastrophe.
Also Twitch has historically been profitable in Europe (or maybe it’s just Western Europe? Can’t remember). Something that Twitch generally keeps quiet but the French streamers I follow never forget to point out when Twitch publicly whines about their supposed nonprofitability.
Which means that NA can’t be that far behind given that the US has higher GDP/capita (buy I guess lower engagement). So when you are combining that information with their bulk discounts, it’s for sure profitable there.
Now maybe Twitch truly isn’t profitable in poorer regions like LatAm where infrastructure costs don’t scale down as fast as sub prices and ad revenue. But regarding Europe and NA, they are openly bullshitting.
I learned the term Information Kessler Syndrome recently.
Now you have too. Together we bear witness to it.