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which goes a long way to scaling back on the reliance of google donations.
$3 million is about 0.67% of the money they get from Google and that money isn’t even going into Firefox development.
The day Firefox shutters its doors is the day the internet truly dies.
Firefox is little more than just a Chrome clone itself, financed by Google no less. It doesn’t do anything to set itself apport. If they cared about an open Internet they should have put some effort into building it (support RSS, Torrent, IPFS, etc.). If Firefox dies tomorrow, nothing much would change as the rest of the Internet already didn’t care. It might however make room for a browser that actually cares about privacy and an open Internet, instead of just using those words for marketing purpose while still having telemetry by default.
Not really. Recommendation algorithms are great for discovering related information and new stuff. They even beat search at its own game, as search is often limited to plain text, while the algorithms take the broader context into account. The problem is that you have no control over the recommendations, no transparency how they work, no way to switch or disable them and no way to explore the deeper knowledge hidden in them. It’s all just a magical black box for more engagement and more ads.
A recommendation algorithms that somehow manages to be open and transparent would be a very big step towards fixing the Web. Lemmy and Co. are too busy replicating failed technology from 30 years ago instead of actually fixing the underlying problems.
The ai is trained on recordings of his voice which they have not secured the rights to though.
Not really the case with the latest models, a couple of seconds of audio are enough to clone a voice, as you can essentially remix it from the all the other training data, you don’t need that persons specific voice for training anymore. This is more a personal rights and trademark issue than a copyright one.
In fact, machine translation started much earlier than this AI craze…
…and has since than switched over to deep learning based stuff like everything else. This “current” AI craze is not new, it has been going on for over a decade if you paid attention.
The thing is no one is outraged about machine translation because it is not a primary creative process.
But reading text from a script is? Seriously? It takes substantial creative effort to translate jokes into something that works in other cultures as well as have the dialog in another language fit into existing lip motions. All of which is now getting replaced by AI. And of course all the voice actors that did the dubs are out of a job as well.
I just leave this link here as counter point (somewhat NSFW):
https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/11un888/flamboyant_origami_fgures/
A whole lot of weird stuff can be created by bashing things together with AI. The beauty of AI is after all that you can “edit” with high level concepts, not just raw pixels.
And as for humans and dogs: https://imgur.com/a/TdXO7tz
How does a completely decentralized platform handle data that should be removed?
You make a blacklists of forbidden content and relays can use or ignore it. It’s up to the relay, there is no central authority that can make content go away globally. Nostr is build to be censorship-resistent.
In the long run I think a platform like that
It’s not a platform, it’s just a protocol and apps using that protocol.
I can move to another Mastodon instance, and keep following the same accounts.
You can’t. What you can and can’t follow is determined by whatever the server federates with, which is not under your control. Also you lose all your followers and in case of server shutdown all the accounts on that server stop existing, so you can’t follow them either.
Federation is a brittle framework that starts collapsing the moment anybody tries to use it seriously.
Let’s not forget threads planned to monetize every interaction it was aware of,
So does GMail. Making money running a bit of the network should not be a problem, quite the opposite, that just means the network won’t run out of money. This kind of arbitrary enforcing of political ideology should have no place this low in the network structure.
Let’s not forget we’re really breaking new ground here
We really aren’t. It’s just repeating what EMail and Usenet have done for 40 years.
There is no central authority in mastodon.
There is no centralized authority on Twitter either, because you can always go and use Facebook. The Web is a federated system where everybody just decided they don’t want to talk to anybody else.
If you make a Mastodon account your digital identity is bound to that one server. You can’t move to another server. You can’t communicate with other servers that got defederated. Exactly the same as Facebook and Twitter. It’s only decentralized up until server admins decide that it isn’t, which already has happened numerous times in the past. The whole thing is basically just based around wishful thinking. If everybody would be niche to each other and servers would run forever, it would be totally fine, but that’s not how the world works.
There are many entities that are part of a federated system, just like email
Email is a terrible protocol by modern standards and the problems of federation show in email pretty clearly, as the majority of people will stick to Gmail and a handful of other major providers. There is no reason to repeat past mistakes. The saving grace with email is that you don’t have the moral police looking through your emails and kicking you from their server when they find something they don’t like (outside of sending spam), with Mastodon on the other side they do exactly that.
It’s federated, not decentralized. Which even Mastodon itself doesn’t seem to realize or care, since they falsely advertise themselves as decentralized.
Decentralized means there is no central authority.
Federation just means there are many centralized authorities, that might or might not communicate with each other.
I really don’t see what Mastodon is supposed to solve in the long run. The server has full control and can do whatever it wants. Just look at what happened Threads.net. Big company joins the Fediverse and instead of celebrating, everybody starts thinking about defederating them. This approach is doomed to fail if it ever gets popular.
Nostr looks like a much more promising approach, with proper cryptographic identities and signatures. Nobody owns you there. Servers are just dumb relays. If one steps out of line, you can just use another one.
The crazy part is that it is not even clear what they signed up for. Everybody started talking “Metaverse” as if it was an actual thing. But it never was. There never was an app, a standard or much of anything.
Second Life ain’t exactly perfect either, but at least that’s an actual thing that exists and in which you can open up your virtual advertisement booth.
It’s crazy how Zuckerberg hyped it up to the extreme, even renamed his company for it and than never actually build anything remotely worth of that name. What is going on in Horizon Worlds still looks less interesting than what they demoed with Facebook Social all the way back in 2016 on Oculus Rift.
Just give me a virtual space where I can watch movies, play games and go shopping with friends. It shouldn’t be that hard to build something that at least feels a bit deeper than just yet another chat app. Or take the silly stuff CodeMiko is doing, that is what I expect to be happening in the Metaverse, yet it happens in 2D on Twitch. Even Meta’s own conferences are still real world events with video screens, not events in the Metaverse.
I don’t mind the idea of the Metaverse, but the implementation is lightyears behind of where it should be.
Yes, it’s public and official: “The external battery supports up to 2 hours of use, and all day use when plugged in.”
VisionPro can barely be considered a portable/mobile device and it won’t even last through a modern movie.
HMD already has replaced my TV, and that’s a crappy one from 5 years ago. VisionPro is on a whole different level in terms of features and resolution. The ability to have a virtual screen wherever you want it and however big you want it shouldn’t be underestimated. And that’s not even counting everything else the headset can do.
Quest2 is $300. That is a pretty reasonably entry price for a Metaverse. Problem there was more that Meta never actually implemented a Metaverse. Putting that thing on your head doesn’t launch you into the Metaverse, but just into the home screen where you select apps to launch from a 2D menu. Their whole software stack does a terrible job of making use of the fact that you have a 3D display on your head. They didn’t even have basic things like VR180-3D trailers for their games. There were no virtual shops to buy stuff. No cinemas to watch stuff. Just apps you can launch. Horizon World, which was supposed to be their Metaverse, was still just another app to launch and not meaningfully integrated with anything else. PlaystationHome was more of a Metaverse than anything Meta ever build, though even that fell rather short.
The thing is, computer interaction can benefit quite a bit from a 3D space. I really liked what Microsoft did with WMR Portal and how it let you organize your apps simply by placing them in a 3D space, meaning you could have a cinema space with all your video related apps, a stack with games that you were playing, a stack with games you finished, etc. You could have frequently used webpages pasted to the walls. You could just grab the things, resize them and put them somewhere else. It was far more intuitive than any 2D interface I ever used and extremely customizable to your needs.
The problem was that it was also incomplete and unfinished in a lot of other ways and Microsoft just gave up on it. Outside of WMR Portal there has been surprisingly little effort into building good VR user interfaces and even less when comes to actively taking advantage of the 3D space (e.g. plenty apps still use drop shadows to simulate 3D instead of making the buttons actually 3D).
Will be interesting to see how well VisionPro does in this space. They seem to be a lot better with the basic UI elements than everybody else (e.g. dynamically lighting them to fit the AR environment and using real 3D), but at the same time, their focus on a static sitting experience without locomotion drastically limits how much advantage you can take from the 3D. Their main menu so far looks more like a table-UI stuck to your face than an 3D UI.
AR has a huge battery life and size problem. The amount of video processing that thing would need to do to be useful, would result in an enormous device with an hour or two of battery life. Rendering it useless for any real world consumer application.
On top of that it has a gigantic privacy and surveillance problem.
And if that wouldn’t be enough, what the heck are you going to do with it? Everything an AR headset could do, you can do today with your phone already. There is very little need to wear that functionality on your head all the time.
For some rare business use cases it can make sense, that’s why Microsoft Hololens is still around, but even they struggle to finding any areas where it makes it past the “nice idea” stage and actually into a working product.
Meta’s very own Horizon Worlds still hasn’t even launched globally, it is still restricted to a small handful of countries. On top of that it isn’t even a Metaverse in any meaningful sense, it’s just yet another VR chat application.
What separates a “real” Metaverse from a normal chat app is that it connects all the other applications into one unified virtual space, but Horizon Worlds ain’t doing that and nobody else is either.
Sony’s Playstation Home back from the PS3 days or Second Life are still closer to a Metaverse than any of the modern attempts.
Even further back there was Lucasfilm’s Habitat all the way back in 1986. It’s kind of shocking how little the idea of the “Metaverse” has evolved since back then. It’s still just some virtual space with avatars, different hats and chatting.
The algorithms killed the platforms
And somewhat ironically, the lack of algorithm is what killed the Web. The Web has a huge problem with discovering new content, it’s essentially impossible unless you already know exactly what to search for, but than of course it isn’t new content anymore. Meanwhile the Facebooks, TikToks and the Youtubes are actually quite good at discovering content, the later two especially can dig up extremely niche interests content with only hundreds of views.
The crux is that they give you no direct way to interact with the algorithm, it’s all guesswork based on your view history and clicks. There is no “show me less clickbait garbage”-button.
The solution should be algorithms that are transparent, switchable and under the users control, but so far I have never seen anybody developing anything like that. It’s either all one algorithm maximizing engagement and ads or some federated thing without any algorithms at all and complete garbage discovery and search.
Very tricky to accomplish as long as people can interact with each other in the real world and bypass whatever rules and restrictions you have in the game rules, be it in terms of just communicating in situations where they shouldn’t be able to or running multiple accounts and characters at the same time to boost their power and influence.
You’d need to get extremely draconian with the anti-cheat, require real world ID for account creation, not allow new player once the game started and all that.
Not even that. The NFT gives you ownership of the NFT itself and nothing more. It doesn’t give you ownership or copyright over whatever the NFT is pointing to. Furthermore the links in the NFT are public and everybody can access them, the NFT does not work as access token to the content.
You could build a system where the NFT acts as access token and where every NFT comes with a license agree that say “Whoever owns this NFT has copyright over work XY”, but nobody has done that yet or at least not at scale.
As far as I am concerned, the Internet has been in a downward spiral ever since smartphones got popular, with nothing in sight to stop that trend. The Web got crippled by content getting moved into proprietary apps and what’s left of the Web is filled with so many ads that an adblocker is pretty much mandatory.
AI provides a way out of this darkness, as it can absorb raw information and regurgitate it in whatever form you desire. That’s huge, that’s like Adblocking, ReaderMode and a whole lot of other tools rolled into one, just even more flexible and controllable by natural language. You can finally separate the information from its (often malicious) presentation. Bots like AutoTL;DR are just the start of it, a lot more little helper like that will follow, especially once we get multi-modal models that can understand and navigate graphical elements.
That would be a good step forward, since many A.I. systems do not fully disclose the data they were trained on.
Neither do most journalists. Most of the articles out there are just copied from other blogs, lacking any originality or fact checking and not even providing links to those sources. Even this very article is just regurgitating the same tired old talking points that have been circulating for a year or so.
DDG is just a wrapper around Bing and substantially worse than Google, smaller index and less up to date. Not needing a login doesn’t really guarantee you anything either, as they still can identify you by IP or device finger print if they want to. You basically have to trust their marketing that they don’t do that.
What makes Kagi interesting is that it’s actually right up there with Google in terms of results, while surpassing it in terms of features. Would I pay $10/month for Kagi? Nope. It’s good, but not magic. It’s still just regular Internet search and you’ll find most of what it finds with other search engines as well, especially when you hop between multiple. But if you want a better search engine and have the money, Kagi does feel like an upgrade, which the other alternatives just don’t.
For one, it’s based in the USA, so it is legally subject to the insane, antidemocratic, and awful state surveillance there.
https://kagi.com/privacy at least sounds pretty good.
It is also a corporation, so it is subject to enshittification.
https://blog.kagi.com/safe-round this sound good as well.
The part that I don’t get is how they can match Google in terms of search results quality when Microsoft couldn’t even get close with Bing and a heck of a lot more time and money.
Phonbloks would never have worked. Phones are all different shapes and sizes, so you just run into tons of compatibility issues whenever you want to upgrade anything, as new components will be larger than the old ones. Technology just doesn’t progress in ways that nicely fits into form factors from five years ago, fingerprint reader, FaceID, multiple cameras, wireless charging, etc. None of that fit into a block model. Phones are also a weird market place where people give up headphones and replaceable batteries if it makes their phone 1mm thinner, so a big bulky modular device would really have much chance against the much sleeker competition.
Fairphone is a much better compromise, it’s modular and repairable, but in a way that is actually practical. Turning everything into LEGO blocks looks fun in concept images, but nobody would want to use that.
Moto Z is/was another more interesting approach, instead of making the phone itself modular, it has some contacts on the back to dock extension modules. So you get extensibility without really changing anything about the phone itself.
It’s good in the sense that Nintendo is sitting on a lot of old games and rather terrible at republishing them. Nintendo Switch still has no VirtualConsole support from what I understand, which is absolutely ridiculous. I’d expect Microsoft to address that. It would also mean Nintendo games becoming multiplatform, which would also be a welcome change.
The downside of course is that Nintendo is rather special in the gaming world. They are still doing a lot of quirky, innovative and family friendly stuff like it’s the 90s. That’ll be lost sooner or later when absorbed into Microsoft.
The issue isn’t that the competition doesn’t offer similar functionality, but that there is no way to move your data to another hoster. If you move CI, you have to rewrite it as everybody uses a different language. If you move pull requests, you lose contact with all the users that made those pull requests, as Github doesn’t allow PMs and doesn’t publish emails by default.
I can move a Git repository in a single line, I can even mirror it to multiple hosts at the same time with ease. With all the surrounding aspects of a project that isn’t possible.
Though worth pointing out that this isn’t a GitHub specific problem, all software hosting suffers from this. Moving data between different Open Source bug tracker ain’t exactly easy either. There aren’t very many tools that are properly distributed in the way Git is and the few that there are, don’t seem to have very wide adoption (e.g. git-bug).
The big and growing issue is that too much functionality is in GitHub and not in Git itself. So while you can move or mirror your repository very easily, moving your issue tracker or pending pull requests is a lot harder and comes with huge loss of information (e.g. there is no way to contact the submitter of a bug report, as all you get is a GitHub username, not email and GitHub doesn’t even offer PMs).
That said, I’d happily ditch GitHub for anything more distributed, e.g. hosting Git repositories on IPFS, integration with git-bug, etc. You can mostly DIY that today, but a hoster that provides some free storage would be very much welcome to help with availability.
Another more basic thing I am missing today is a redirect service for repository names , having https://github.com/User/Project.git spread all over the build files makes it hard to move hosters or provide backup repositories. GNU Guix has mirror:// to solve that, but that’s about the only place I can think of with mirroring build in.
That’s not a limitation of ML, but just how it is commonly used. You can take every parameter that neural network recognizes and tweak it, make it bigger, smaller, recombine it with other stuff and marvel at the results. That’s how we got origami porn, (de)cartoonify AI, QR code art, Balenciaga, dancing statues or my 5min attempt at reinventing cubism (tell AI to draw cubes over a depthmap).
Yawn, are we still repeating blinding repeating this utter nonsense from a year ago?