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Google is going ‘all in’ on AI. It’s part of a troubling trend in big tech

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    Luckily, 90% of what Google goes all in on fails. I remember Stadia and Google Glass.

  • Nothing I can do to resist?

    I admire your optimism, but we are pissing in the wind.

    Microsoft is shoving this copilot in all its products? Alright, Linux and open source it is.

    Windows 11 is forcing people to throw away functional computers that Microsoft seems "not secure enough" (it's lacking TMP 2.0)

    This means you can get a great deal on one of these "inscure pc"... but in the long run your pc now and tomorrow will have TPM. As time progresses, the use of TPM/attestation will become more and more entrenched in application, web pages, everything. ... and Linux, with its 4% user base, will be left out in cold.

    Google is bugging with its spyware? Well, I only use a Pixel phone, and ironically, its the best phone to put GrapheneOS on it.

    Currently, many banking apps won't run on Graphene (or any custom firmware) due to attestation.

    Graphene issued calls for help, because Google is restricting public access to the latest android source code (I cannot find the links atm).

    Gmail? I don't remember when I opened mine the last time...

    Today things like "email reputation" make it difficult to host your own mail server, so your stuck paying someone who has a better "reputation".

    My point is: today, you and I can resist with some (minor) success, but our days are numbered.

    You are arguing for the sake of arguing...

    TPM has nothing to do with any privacy invasion, AI, or anything bad really. It was conceived by a computer industry consortium called Trusted Computing Group (TCG). It evolved into TPM Main Specification Version 1.2 which was standardized by International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).

    Advancement in technology will always happen, and if your prose is to stop progress, you are up by your own by your own choice. Your argument about TPM is moot.

    Quite a lot if banking apps are compatible. If your banking app doesn't work, use the jail/sandbox compatible mode.

    The fact that Linux has 2, 3, 4, 64467% has nothing to do with what is available at your disposal. Strawman fallacy here.

    No one talked about hosting your own email server, there are alternative to the fucker-corps with privacy in mind.

    You, my friend, are already defeated, but rest assured there are a ton of us still on our feet.

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    The rich are cashing in our tax dollars to try to automate their control of an enslaved human race.

    They will do anything besides just pay taxes and contribute to society

  • Nothing I can do to resist?

    I admire your optimism, but we are pissing in the wind.

    Microsoft is shoving this copilot in all its products? Alright, Linux and open source it is.

    Windows 11 is forcing people to throw away functional computers that Microsoft seems "not secure enough" (it's lacking TMP 2.0)

    This means you can get a great deal on one of these "inscure pc"... but in the long run your pc now and tomorrow will have TPM. As time progresses, the use of TPM/attestation will become more and more entrenched in application, web pages, everything. ... and Linux, with its 4% user base, will be left out in cold.

    Google is bugging with its spyware? Well, I only use a Pixel phone, and ironically, its the best phone to put GrapheneOS on it.

    Currently, many banking apps won't run on Graphene (or any custom firmware) due to attestation.

    Graphene issued calls for help, because Google is restricting public access to the latest android source code (I cannot find the links atm).

    Gmail? I don't remember when I opened mine the last time...

    Today things like "email reputation" make it difficult to host your own mail server, so your stuck paying someone who has a better "reputation".

    My point is: today, you and I can resist with some (minor) success, but our days are numbered.

    We can, but part of it is accepting that our tech will be a decade or two behind. Its not the worst thing. Life is more convenient now, but all in all i think it was better before.

    The masses will go for convenient, and thats ok. You have near total control of how you live your life; you just cant have your cake and eat it too is all

  • Guess my next phone is coming from Oneplus or Fairphone.

    bUt AnDrOiD!!!

    ...can be chained to its desk and limited, I agree.

    Since when does Oneplus support Calyx or Grapheme?

  • Switch over to the Qwant search engine for your basic search and a good email provider like Tutamail or Proton. I have for a few months and there really is no reason to go back. It's simple and it works.

    For search I'm really happy with Kagi

  • And it’s fucking awful.

    DLSS? No way lol. DLSS often gives better image quality than native resolution, and gives you a choice in image quality vs performance increase options. It's a god send.

    DLSS is even worse cancer than TAA

    You've clearly never used DLSS, at least not DLSS3 or 4. I've got a 4070 Super and Ryzen 7 and I use DLSS by choice literally every time it's available.

    Lolwut? No it doesn't? Yeah it turns off TAA so it might look sharper at first, and if you turn off the ugly ass sharpening then it's playable but literally any other option looks better than TAA, including TXAA from early 2010s lol.

    Do you maybe mean DLAA? I Have an RTX 3090 and a 9800X3D. It's ok. When the option exists I just crank up the res or turn on MSAA instead. Much better.

    If you mean DLSS, my condolences. I'd rather play with FXAA most of the time.

    The only game I'll use DLSS (on Transformer model+Quality) in is CP2077 with Path Tracing. With Ray Reconstruction it's almost worth the blurriness, especially because that game forces TAA unless you use DLAA/DLSS and I don't get a playable framerate without it, but also don't want to play without Path Tracing. Maybe one day I'll have the hardware needed to run it with PT and DLAA

  • Switch over to the Qwant search engine for your basic search and a good email provider like Tutamail or Proton. I have for a few months and there really is no reason to go back. It's simple and it works.

    I'm self-hosting my mails; no need for another third party that will decide whatever whenever. The major difficulty is the decades of things that are reliant on the old one.

    And I just said that google works fine for search, despite people claiming it's on the decline, broken, unusable, etc. That's not to move toward qwant, who are no less shady, burn money (sometimes coming from public money…), and despite wonderful claim of an autonomous index, completely stop working when Bing is down. As far as recommendations for search engine goes, google (and Bing for that matter) are far less disingenuous.
    All usable search engines these days are backed by the big ones anyway. Something like https://openwebsearch.eu/ would be a better alternative, assuming it follows on its promises.

  • Lolwut? No it doesn't? Yeah it turns off TAA so it might look sharper at first, and if you turn off the ugly ass sharpening then it's playable but literally any other option looks better than TAA, including TXAA from early 2010s lol.

    Do you maybe mean DLAA? I Have an RTX 3090 and a 9800X3D. It's ok. When the option exists I just crank up the res or turn on MSAA instead. Much better.

    If you mean DLSS, my condolences. I'd rather play with FXAA most of the time.

    The only game I'll use DLSS (on Transformer model+Quality) in is CP2077 with Path Tracing. With Ray Reconstruction it's almost worth the blurriness, especially because that game forces TAA unless you use DLAA/DLSS and I don't get a playable framerate without it, but also don't want to play without Path Tracing. Maybe one day I'll have the hardware needed to run it with PT and DLAA

    What are you talking about “temporal+quality” for DLSS? That’s not a thing.

    DLSS I’m talking about. There are many comparisons out there showing how amazing it is, often resulting in better IQ than native.

    FXAA is not an AI upscaler, what are you talking about?

  • the fuck does service now even need AI for?

    I hate any company I work for that uses ServiceNow. And now it's getting worse??

    Need? None. There are certainly areas that "ai" tools excel at but what I saw was a company literally forcing it into every aspect of the system. Every single booth at the conference, regardless of the topic, made a point to talk about agentic AI. It was my first time there and I left feeling like I got screwed, because I missed out on quality content that I could use in lieu of AI that I'll never use.

    If I were I prospective customer, I'd be looking at other solutions for sure.

  • “Bad” is SN’s claim to fame. Everybody hates it. Apparently, the worse they make it, the more companies will throw money at them.

    I think the biggest problem, is anytime you try and create a universal, low/no-code platform that anyone can use, it results in a poorly optimized, sandboxed, half cocked product. Sure, you can do anything with the platform, but half the time it's like shoving a square peg in a round hole. I have had to write bad code and processes because that is the only way to get somethings done in the platform.

    Also, if I go out and custom create an app, like say I create a fully loaded app for HR, and it's similar to a product they sell, they will charge you for that product.

  • Luckily, 90% of what Google goes all in on fails. I remember Stadia and Google Glass.

    I remember some people very vehemently telling me that I was dumb to be skeptical of Stadia, that it really was going to just take over the industry...

  • The rich are cashing in our tax dollars to try to automate their control of an enslaved human race.

    They will do anything besides just pay taxes and contribute to society

    AI is not needed to automate the control of the human race. I feel like it's already essentially automated from the rich's perspective.

  • Luckily, 90% of what Google goes all in on fails. I remember Stadia and Google Glass.

    In that case, we should encourage google to go all-in on climate change, racism, and war; they should back the conservative party as well. Then 90% of those will fail.

  • I remember some people very vehemently telling me that I was dumb to be skeptical of Stadia, that it really was going to just take over the industry...

    I still don't understand how Stadia got out the door the way it did. It was the exact same business model Onlive tried back in the day. And it predictably failed the exact same way.

  • AI is not needed to automate the control of the human race. I feel like it's already essentially automated from the rich's perspective.

    it is "automated" by some "peasants" they are already paying "too much". maybe they want to reduce those costs too.

    also AI serverparks may consume so much power that they are more costly (for now?), but at least they don't question your commands. maybe that's how they see it.

  • Not sure how far back you’re talking but for a VERY long time they have been and continue to be in the business of what feeds the machine.

    Why do you think we have computers in our possession 24/7? Not because we wanted it, but because they told us we wanted it and it enabled us to be available to feed the machine 24/7. You can work more. You can buy more.

    Social media? Feeds the machine.

    Television? Feeds the machine.

    Cars? Feeds the machine.

    Phones. Telegraphs. Fucking lightbulbs.

    All used to feed the machine.

    True, in a broad sense. I am speaking moreso to enshittification and the degradation of both experience and control.

    If this was just "now everything has Siri, it's private and it works 100x better than before" it would be amazing. That would be like cars vs horses. A change, but a perceived value and advantage.

    But it's not. Not right now anyways. Right now it's like replacing a car with a pod that runs on direct wind. If there is any wind over say, 3mph it works, and steers 95% as well as existing cars. But 5% of the time it's uncontrollable and the steering or brakes won't respond. And when there is no wind over 3mph it just doesn't work.

    In this hypothetical, the product is a clear innovation, offers potential benefits long term in terms of emissions and fuel, but it doesn't do the core task well, and sometimes it just fucks it up.

    The television, cars, social media, all fulfilled a very real niche. But nearly everyone using AI, even those using it as a tool for coding (arguably its best use case) often don't want to use it in search or in many of these other "forced" applications because of how unreliable it is. Hence why companies have tried (and failed at great expense) to replace their customer service teams with LLMs.

    This push is much more top down.

    Now drink your New Coke and Crystal Pepsi.

  • it is "automated" by some "peasants" they are already paying "too much". maybe they want to reduce those costs too.

    also AI serverparks may consume so much power that they are more costly (for now?), but at least they don't question your commands. maybe that's how they see it.

    That's absurd, the AI is not more costly than a human worker, it's just not as capable. The energy cost of a human alone is greater than that of any AI agent that would take its place. If you really think that AI costs that much energy, you just don't have a sense of scale. The server-farm costing a lot overall does not at all mean that an individual API call is expensive.

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    I've been playing Watch Dogs Legion so I know how this ends.

  • I still don't understand how Stadia got out the door the way it did. It was the exact same business model Onlive tried back in the day. And it predictably failed the exact same way.

    From what I call, the advocates kept saying:

    • OnLive was just too soon, the internet needed to be better
    • Google had just so much more resources at their disposal they could make it happen

    Of course, no one ever explained why I would want to pay full price for a game and also have to pay a monthly fee to access it once purchased, which was the most mind boggling facet of Google's concept to me, even more boggling than trying to make games render server side when the cheapest end user device can just locally render PS3, maybe PS4 level graphics nowadays.

  • Compact but Capable: Oiwa Garage’s Custom Honda Acty Projects

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  • Former and current Microsofties react to the latest layoffs

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    eightbitblood@lemmy.worldE
    Incredibly well said. And couldn't agree more! Especially after working as a game dev for Apple Arcade. We spent months proving to them their saving architecture was faulty and would lead to people losing their save file for each Apple Arcade game they play. We were ignored, and then told it was a dev problem. Cut to the launch of Arcade: every single game has several 1 star reviews about players losing their save files. This cannot be fixed by devs as it's an Apple problem, so devs have to figure out novel ways to prevent the issue from happening using their own time and resources. 1.5 years later, Apple finishes restructuring the entire backend of Arcade, fixing the problem. They tell all their devs to reimplement the saving architecture of their games to be compliant with Apples new backend or get booted from Arcade. This costs devs months of time to complete for literally zero return (Apple Arcade deals are upfront - little to no revenue is seen after launch). Apple used their trillions of dollars to ignore a massive backend issue that affected every player and developer on Apple Arcade. They then forced every dev to make an update to their game at their own expense just to keep it listed on Arcade. All while directing user frustration over the issue towards developers instead of taking accountability for launching a faulty product. Literally, these companies are run by sociopaths that have egos bigger than their paychecks. Issues like this are ignored as it's easier to place the blame on someone down the line. People like your manager end up getting promoted to the top of an office heirachy of bullshit, and everything the company makes just gets worse until whatever corpse is left is sold for parts to whatever bigger dumb company hasn't collapsed yet. It's really painful to watch, and even more painful to work with these idiots.
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    I have a rough idea of their efficiency as I've used them, not in professional settings but I wager it would not be too different. My point is more that it feels like the rugs are finally starting to get pulled. This tech is functionnal as you said, it works to a point and that point is enough for a sizeable amount of people. But I doubt that the price most people are paying now is enough to cover the cost of answering their queries. Now that some people, especially younger devs or people who never worked without those tools are dependant on it, they can go ahead and charge more. But it's not too late, so I'm hoping it will make some people more aware of that kind of scheme and that they will stop feeding the AI hype in general.
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  • Is the ‘tech bro-ification’ of abortion here?

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    Nah. Been working in tech for nearly 30 years, "tech bro" is a delineation. Keeps the fuckers from smearing the rest of us
  • The AI girlfriend guy - The Paranoia Of The AI Era

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    Saying 'don't downvote' is the flammable inflammable conundrum, both don't and do parse as do.
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    A carrot perhaps... Or a very big stick.
  • CrowdStrike Announces Layoffs Affecting 500 Employees

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    This is where the magic of near meaningless corpo-babble comes in. The layoffs are part of a plan to aspirationally acheive the goal of $10b revenue by EoY 2025. What they are actually doing is a significant restructuring of the company, refocusing by outside hiring some amount of new people to lead or be a part of departments or positions that haven't existed before, or are being refocused to other priorities... ... But this process also involves laying off 500 of the 'least productive' or 'least mission critical' employees. So, technically, they can, and are, arguing that their new organizational paradigm will be so succesful that it actually will result in increased revenue, not just lower expenses. Generally corpos call this something like 'right-sizing' or 'refocusing' or something like that. ... But of course... anyone with any actual experience with working at a place that does this... will tell you roughly this is what happens: Turns out all those 'grunts' you let go of, well they actually do a lot more work in a bunch of weird, esoteric, bandaid solutions to keep everything going, than upper management was aware of... because middle management doesn't acknowledge or often even understand that that work was being done, because they are generally self-aggrandizing narcissist petty tyrants who spend more time in meetings fluffing themselves up than actually doing any useful management. Then, also, you are now bringing on new, outside people who look great on paper, to lead new or modified apartments... but they of course also do not have any institutional knowledge, as they are new. So now, you have a whole bunch of undocumented work that was being done, processes which were being followed... which is no longer being done, which is not documented.... and the new guys, even if they have the best intentions, now have to spend a quarter or two or three figuring out just exactly how much pre-existing middle management has been bullshitting about, figuring out just how much things do not actually function as they ssid it did... So now your efficiency improving restructuring is actually a chaotic mess. ... Now, this 'right sizing' is not always apocalyptically extremely bad, but it is also essentially never totally free from hiccups... and it increases stress, workload, and tensions between basically everyone at the company, to some extent. Here's Forbes explanation of this phenomenon, if you prefer an explanation of right sizing in corpospeak: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/rightsizing/