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pickledoyster

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Backing up Spotify 7 months ago

One thing you haven't noted is radio.

Some local radio DJs frequently play songs I enjoy that have under 1K plays on youtube. No algo or platform is surfacing those. Local radio gets me both local and international music. A friend of mine prefers critically acclaimed stuff, so he streams radio shows from NTS and the like.

A bit of OT, but I have four iPhone 5/5s/SE (the SE is peak design and form factor, fight me) lying around that I use strictly as offline devices for things like saving data from my heart rate monitor, controlling my action camera, doing voice/field recordings through the 3.5mm connector – stuff I'd prefer never to leave my device (or data that should be open to user control but requires an invasive app to work, I have very few apps on my daily driver).

These devices are are small, snappy and powerful enough in 2025.

This is based on HSBC's model, which assumes some incredible numbers, such as: > user numbers on an S-curve that by 2030 reaches 3bn, “equivalent to 44 per cent of the world’s adult population” ex China.

Unfounded statements (outside of language tasks, fwiw), such as: >LLM subscriptions will become “as ubiquitous and useful as Microsoft 365”, HSBC says.

As well as this bold claim about OAI's potential to double the conversion rate: >It models that by 2030, 10 per cent of OpenAI users will be paying customers, versus an estimated 5 per cent currently.

Does not include a major player in its market share analysis at all: >Google is excluded entirely

And, still, it suggests that: > OpenAI is expected to still be subsidising its users well into next decade

Fascinating.

Several European governments have jailed people for social media posts. Many Europeans support this - they don't understand how government censorship can quickly get out of hand.

I think quite a few Europeans have lasting and direct experience with totalitarian, oppressive regimes. Which might also explain why they have stricter (or simply more precise) laws governing expression – not as an oppressive tool, but as a safety valve for the society.

We're Joining OpenAI 11 months ago

The training data is full ads. For books, you have publisher-influenced rankings, SEO slop and promotional social media posts. It's GIGO, and has been that way from the start.

A small web July 12 months ago

This is nice. A few thoughts:

It's sad to know that sobriety groups use addictive tech for check-ins.

Replace scrolling with building - building out my RSS reader, my website, my personal link connections, my skills in using a static site generator, etc.

I've personally found that this approach is just not enough. Sure, I might be "building" something with distracting stuff just a click away, all the while I'm still sitting, staring at a screen, and, fundamentally, in denial that life is possible without the Web.

Took me a couple of years to come to this realization, I went through the whole schtick of getting off doomscroll portals by deleting accounts and using alternative frontends, using addons on my browser to limit and then block those sites, using screentime limits, removing apps, reducing colors on my phone, getting into static websites, web publishing, audio editing, etc. – all of this effort to end up here, commenting on a VC-backed forum during my working hours, because it requires me to sit in front of a screen.

It's like strapping yourself into the chair from A Clockwork Orange (and managing/maintaining each strap) just to pretend that, for many of us, this tech is not a clear net negative, and that those negatives don't come from all sides, i.e., it's not just particular apps or sites we use, it's the tech itself that makes us stationary, distracted, obsessed, overstimulated, etc.

There's something fundamentally wrong if I'm picking up my distraction device because of a "touch grass" notification, much like trying to fix radiation poisoning by trying a different isotope.

Then again, those that make a more radical shift and get off the web don't waste time publishing blog posts about their framework to get off the web. Of, for that matter, comment on said posts...

Being passionate about hats is one thing, but being passionate about sharing something you care about with others is the real driver for publishing. As LLMs degrade web discoverability through search (summaries+slop results), there's no incentive for the latter people to continue publishing on the open web or even the bot-infested closed gardens.

The web is on a trajectory where a local dyi zine will reach as many readers as an open website. It might even be cheaper than paying for a domain+hosting once that industry contracts and hosting plans aren't robust enough to keep up with requests from vibe-coded scrapers.

They replaced an always on-screen OS navigation button that's been there since Windows 7 with an ad!!

That must be doing wonders for the click rate. I can see the pre-promotion powerpoint slide now: "User engagement with Copilot is showing exponential growth"

I'm not a fan of horror, but it seems like it's still extremely profitable (low budget -> solid viewership in theaters/streaming) and the one genre where creatives have enough freedom to experiment and do stuff out of the ordinary

Indeed, as another comment linked to https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/21819-impact-of-ongoing-war... it seems pretty clear that this is not the case:

We've used our available connections to try to keep them safe. There's no way to get them out of the conscription. However, they're an incredibly talented security researcher and engineer and it would be extraordinarily misguided to send them to front line combat. This seems to be understood now.

They spend 18 hours a day in conversation with chatbots.

Engagement metrics like that are what product managers love to see. Promotions incoming. /s

Sad to see it, but I believe these "companions" and "spiritual gurus" will generate the most revenue in B2C. If you have a user base that's on the slop drip 24/7, you can make them pay premium and target them with ads at the same time. The trend is already here: people listen to podcasts, follow influencers and streamers on every platform just for the surrogate friendship effects. Why not automate it away and make the spiritual guru bot sell you the next vpn subscription?

I believe there are some debatable assumptions baked into your comment, so I have to ask. Do you believe that the entirety of all possible knowledge ("answers") is already online? If not, how is new knowledge supposed to appear online: what are the incentives to put it up on the web if the last open gateways to it are killed by this LLM "experience"? And, if new information must be added continuously, how is it supposed to be vetted?

That last one is important, since you state: > That model worked when the web was smaller, but now it’s overwhelming.

Because it seems like the "experience" changes, but the underlying model of sucking up data off the web does not. If it was "overwhelming" in the past, how is it supposed to be easier now, with subsidized slop machines putting up new information full-tilt?

Infrastructure helps more. I live in a hilly city and break a mild sweat pedaling up a hill to get home from work (no complaints, it's good cardio). e-scooters and bikes - slowly - get up the hills too, but it's a major difference (especially for scooters) doing this up on an old bumpy sidewalk vs an asphalt bike path

No. This is not webview, this is opening a full Safari browser instance and disregarding the user's default browser setting. It also used to be the case with doing a dictionary look up anywhere in iOS too, where the user selects a word, uses the popup menu to Loop Up, and then selects Search Web. This resulted in the absurd situation where you're using your default browser, looking up a word, selecting Search Web and then having Safari (again, not the default browser) open with a search query. Thankfully, at least that behavior has changed recently

tell your users "We only support Firefox and Chrome on iOS, and not Safari, because we do not own apple hardware"

I'd be pissed if someone did that for my browser engine of choice. Also, from what I understand, Apple still leads in accessibility, so this would be an asshole move towards consumers stuck in that ecosystem just because Google and Microsoft can't get their act together.

On top of that, iOS continues to push Safari on users by disregarding their default browser settings.

Steps to reproduce: 0. Select a different default browser, delete the Safari app (just for good measure, even though it's not really possible just like deleting IE in older Win versions) 1. Open the Books app 2. Select text 3. Select Search 4. Press Search the Web 5. Safari search results open as you stare in disbelief