In theory, no.

In practice, yes.

If you haven’t seen, his testimony is hilarious. Clip here: https://youtu.be/0pvJmxe7LdE?t=1217

I almost started a little rant about Ignaz Semmelweis before I got the joke. :P

Everything bad people said about web apps 20+ years ago has proved true.

It’s like, great, now we have consistent cross-platform software. But it’s all bloated, slow, and only “consistent” with itself (if even). The world raced to the bottom, and here we are. Everything is bound to lowest-common-denominator tech. Everything has all the disadvantages of client-server architecture even when it all runs (or should run) locally.

It is completely fucking insane how long I have to wait for lists to populate with data that could already be in memory.

But at least we’re not stuck with Windows-only admin consoles anymore, so that’s nice.

All the advances in hardware performance have been used to make it faster (more to the point, “cheaper”) to develop software, not faster to run it.

For instance, a leaked 2009 Pepsi marketing presentation with language such as “The Pepsi DNA finds its origin in the dynamic of perimeter oscillations…our proposition is the establishment of a gravitational pull to shift from a transactional experience to an invitational expression …”

uhhh okay this is tough. how about:

Pepsi is known for waves (maybe lmao? i genuinely don’t know what perimeter oscillations is trying to say). We want to make people feel like buying Pepsi isn’t just buying something but is an invitation.

LOL that one’s a mess.

“Perimeter oscillations” sounds to me like a way to describe shifts in consumer opinions and preferences. A really dumb way. But who knows? Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of marketing execs?

I get the same feeling from corpo-speak as I get from bad poetry. Like the author runs all their ideas through a few rounds of mutations, out of fear of being seen as simple. The goal is not to be understood, but to make yourself harder to criticize.

What fresh hell is this?

Sort of. But the sorting algorithm is not so simple that you can call it neutral or natural.

I don’t think the details of Reddit’s ranking algorithm are public. Even within a single sub, it’s not as simple as counting user votes. That’s weighed against age, and all sorts of fuzzy bot/fraud detection mechanisms. I think Reddit intentionally injects noise into the system. You’ll see phantom votes all the time to keep things “balanced”.

And then in /all, I believe some subreddits are banned entirely, and again it’s not as simple as “most votes” or “most votes weighed against age”.

Here’s a Chicago Tribune article from 2016 that mentions the change I mentioned before: https://www.chicagotribune.com/2016/12/01/reddit-to-crack-down-on-most-toxic-users-of-pro-trump-forum/

Reddit had to change one of its algorithms over the summer to try to stop r/the_Donald from dominating the board that displays all of Reddit’s content, known as r/all.

It’s light on details and again, I don’t think details were ever published. Reddit is closed-source so really it’s anybody’s guess how they’re really ranking posts.

/r/all was also algorithmically curated. Not to mention easily and heavily gamed by bots, trolls, and state-sponsored disinformation campaigns.

That’s how we got Trump in the first place. /r/the_donald was constantly shoved in everyone’s face, and even Reddit had to eventually admit the system was compromised. IIRC they adjusted the algorithm in an attempt to counterbalance it sometime around…2017? I forget exactly but it was definitely too late.

Lemmy’s not structurally better in that regard, unfortunately. If we’re not already inundated with bots and other malefactors (big if tbh), it’s just because we’re not big enough to attract them yet.

There are a million of these out there. Most of them suck. Many are, at best, ethically gray. Even the better ones spy on you in a hundred different ways.

I’d love something that actually didn’t suck, but “185 million dollar AI startup” doesn’t sound promising to me.

The big problem with the concept is that there’s money to be made by gaming the system and nobody is good at that cat and mouse game. AI could theoretically help, but let’s be real: it’s just going to scrape the same 100 identical Amazon referral listicles you’d get in a Google search, with an extra sprinkling of ads.

Posts on Twitter can get flagged with “Community Notes”, generally to advise readers about inaccuracies and lies.

Apparently “Community Note” has been verbed, without so much as a hyphen.

Yuck.

“Gets Community Noted” is such an awkward turn of phrase.

The number in e.g. “Category 5” hurricane actually refers to the Kinsey scale.

Unga bunga.

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Can’t bring myself to read this whole thing, but it seems clear to me that he can’t see the forest through the trees. By and large, the hate has nothing to do woth biases on what McCartney is “supposed” to be, or intellectual musings on synths.

It’s just fucking annoying.

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The last time I did any html/css work was about 15 years ago. Now I’m curious what’s changed.

Microsoft CEO Can’t Understand Why No Fish Wants a Tongue-eating Parasitic Louse in its Mouth

In all seriousness, this is very interesting, if only because the methods are easy to control and reproduce.

That said, I’d really like to see comparisons against a more typical warmup routine. I’m not sure the tendon vibration is doing anything more than simulating a warmup. Even that on its own is interesting, just because it opens the door for more targeted experimentation.

UN-confirmed

In case anyone misread that, they mean the United Nations (UN) confirmed it.

Yes, it’s a genocide. Genocide is bad. It’s not that fucking complicated.