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Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: May 3rd, 2025

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  • Yeah, it could be, but these guys aren’t looking to replace human workers with a robust, well-trained, and properly-deployed AI, they’re looking to slash and burn their labor costs with whatever they think will squeak by.

    I’ve used Amazon’s AI live chat bots a fair bit over the years and I have to say they’re actually pretty good. 90% of the time they can resolve the issue themselves (at least in my experience) and faster than it would take to connect to a person. But most people don’t have Amazon’s budget or customer service-oriented business model.




  • Your scale is off there… it should probably be more like: cult(-100)...religion(-80).................atheism(0).................?'

    A group of people that is very serious about what they believe in, no matter how illogical it is.

    It’s pretty easy to invert that statement: a group of people that is very unserious about what they believe in? That would be folks like DIscordians, the Church of the SubGenius, Pastafarians, etc.




  • Interesting, I never even knew Brave had that stuff built in, i switched from Chrome years ago and installing ublock origin had already just become the default thing I do to any browser first thing by that point. Though I will note this line in the link you provided:

    For as long as we’re able (and assuming the cooperation of the extension authors), Brave will continue to support some privacy-relevant MV2 extensions—specifically AdGuard, NoScript, uBlock Origin, and uMatrix

    Which suggests that they’re planning to eventually be forced into Manifest V3 (or something similar) to gimp those extensions, but I s’pose I’ll give it a shot without ublock and see how it goes. Firefox has given me trouble in a bunch of ways (not remembering per-page zoom, hotkeys changing on me unexpectedly, issues with reddit/lemmy on long posts, etc) and I wouldn’t mind switching back.



  • My nephew has a Pixel Fold and it’s kinda neat and all, but he barely uses the unfold feature cause he just doesn’t need a big screen most of the time so it’s mostly just a really thick-ass phone. It’s not even great for watching movies because it’s a weird aspect ratio so you have big black bars on the top and/or sides.

    Also we tried folding phones before, we called them flip phones, and the hinges were always the first thing to break.










  • Israel will definitely retaliate (for the strikes that are retaliating against its strikes, it just goes round and round.) The US is moving naval assets into the region so they’re apparently taking the threat seriously. It was a combination of the US, UK, France, Germany, and ~50 other nations that voted to declare Iran in violation of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty so they likely have a vested interest as well, but Europe isn’t nearly as gung-ho about this sort of thing as the US is so they’re likely to let us take the lead if it goes that far. Iran’s neighbors have been trying to normalize relations with Israel for a while now but Israel doesn’t have puppet strings on them like we have on Israel so they likely won’t get involved either way. This is probably going to stay an Israel-Iran(-US) thing for a bit, but again it depends on how serious Iran wants to take this. I expect their losses in enrichment facilities were something baked into the cost of the program so they’re probably not too stuffed over that, but they’ve lost at least two high-ranking military commanders that I’ve heard of so far and that thing does tend to get them cranky in the pants. I suppose the Houthis in Yemen are kind of a wild-card considering they’re supported at least to some extent by Iran and have no compunction against bloodying Israel’s nose (see all the ships they’ve attacked in the Red Sea recently), but also they’re not likely to be able to accomplish much more than a token effort.

    Honestly it’s all speculation at this point. And I’m by no means an expert on geopolitics nor do I have the latest information on the region, so that’s particularly wild-assed and largely-uninformed speculation to boot, so I’m not going to try to lay odds on it. My gut says it will probably just be an exchange of blows and settle down like these things tend to do, but the rhetoric is in high gear so there’s definitely the potential for more trouble coming down the pike.