A few trips to a hardware store and hours of tinkering later, the trio had built a contraption. Yes, it was leaky. It was inefficient. But it would form the basis of the company […]

[…] the number of employees listed on LinkedIn has halved since December 2021. Infarm declined to comment for this piece, and said it does not “comment on any rumours, speculations or opinions.”

Sounds like they’re already being sued and want to stay quiet for legal reasons. What a mess.

On top of all of this, those efforts to tame and control outputs from the developer side could be abused to simply appease investors or totalitarian markets. So we might see a Disneyfication like we‘re seeing on other platforms like Youtube with their horrendous filters, spawning ridiculous terms like „unlifed“. And just imagine the level of censorship we‘d see if they ever try to get into the Chinese market because clearly, the ‚non‘ in non-profit is becoming more and more silent.

Gangster organizations like the Yakuza or the italian mafia ARE those white collar criminals doing lobbying and getting rich through loop holes in the system. They‘re more powerful than ever and don‘t have to break anyone‘s bones or smash anyone‘s store anymore. They won.

Just one? You underestimate german bureaucracy, Freundchen.

I think you misunderstand something. The same thing many AI enthusiasts and critics often choose to not understand. Regenerative AIs aren‘t just born from plain code and they don’t just imitate. They use a ton of data as reference points. It’s literally in the name of the technology.

You could claim „well maybe they used different voices and mixed them together“ but that is highly unlikely, given how much of a wild west approach most regenerative AI services have. it‘s more likely they used protected property here in a way it was not intended to be used. In which case SJ does indeed have a legal case here.

As if Spotify wasn‘t bordering bloatware territory already. Just give me a music subscription service without the dozenth of functions I will never use or „recommendations“ that are clearly just paid ads and don‘t fit my taste at all.

Sounds like absolute garbage.

Youtube premium is a very short sighted band-aid solution. Because the more people sign up for it early, the more expensive and/or less convenient it will become later when the ‘market is saturated’ (meaning there’s no one left who wants to sign up for it). When they can’t grow their income through more users, they’ll ramp up prices and shave off services. It’s happening everywhere already and in the end you’ll wish everyone advocated for adblockers a little more because by the time you’re fed up with their pricing, it might already be too late to go back.

It‘s laughable to expect corporations to act against their only purpose. As soon as a company sells shares it takes the route of infinite growth which is impossible. First they grow their user base and once they start to inevitably stagnate, they start milking their costumers, shaving off features and laying off workers in order to grow their income. It is really the only way for them to remain existent when the market is saturated. They cannot stay in business when they make billions a year when these billions aren‘t even more billions than last year. You can‘t attract new investors that way and therefore cannot continue to exist. Enshittyfication only just started. It cannot possibly get better when they can‘t expand their user base, only worse. They know they will self destruct eventually, but that doesn‘t matter as long as shareholders get their piece of the cake and jump ship to sink the next one. Just being a massively profitable company is bad business if you‘re not growing. That‘s the state of capitalism we‘re in.

Google‘s ‚auto complete‘ is driving me nuts sometimes and it‘s also prevalent on Youtube. I mean just scrolling through completely unrelated suggestions in Youtube‘s search results tells you how little they care to show you what you actually want and rather something that makes them more money one way or another. But the direct fiddling with actual search quarries is just malpractice for a search engine.

Twitter made Trump win in 2016. Like, did people seriously forget about „Trump tweeted“ headlines that dominated daily news for years? The same news that would then claim a small obscure website like 4Chan made Trump president single-handedly. I mean I almost can‘t blame you for memory holing those years, but claiming Twitter wasn‘t absolute dog water before Musk is simply wrong.

It already was prior to Musk’s takeover.

It’s crazy how media pretends Twitter wasn’t the biggest contributor to Trump’s MAGA movement, being the most followed user on the site up until his fanatic followers stormed the US capitol. I mean did people already forget these dreadful years of “Trump tweeted” headlines every single day??? Twitter has been an enemy to democracy for many years.

The creators are known to lean towards tankie rhetotic and I‘ve read they chose .ml because of Marx and Lenin before. That rose concerns from the beginning so it‘s hardly surprising a moderator there would do this. It is very concerning nonetheless and threatens to throw the creators‘ work into jeopardy because at that point you might as well use twixxer or whatever it‘s called now.

Sounds like the usual fear mongering of technology similar to „humans weren‘t made to drive steam lokomotives. Those incredible speeds will surely drive us all insane!“ I mean they‘re citing Ian Mortimer who has proven again and again that he does not understand nor care about human behavior throughout history. It isn‘t surprising someone who thinks we all crawled in the mud just centuries earlier would be overwhelmed with our own mirror image but that‘s far from reality.

Until they sell that platform too and you have to grow your follower base somewhere else yet again.

Unreal Engine almost has a monopoly at this point. It‘s also very friendly to use for small indie devs, not charging you anything for the first million dollars you make. Their license fees also seem rather fair as of now. But it doesn‘t help competition is flat lining left and right. Epic Games could feel their engine is worth a little more when Unity is gone too so I‘m happy to see many hobby devs give Godot a try first. I hope a company like Valve with their sheer infinite resources will see the shrinking market of Unreal alternatives and give their engine development a serious push. We really need more diversity when it comes to Engines.

Tech blogs and the like have long compared the specs and the conclusion was a difference of 3 generations to other high end phones which I was told is a 5 year gap. And if it really had been a fully domestic chip, developing it this quickly would have been quite the achievement actually. But parts from south korea were found so that was a short celebration.

They act in their own interests, you make it sound like sanctions are the state of nature.

It is common practice in China itself. It is how they have dealt with pretty much everything so far. Why is it surprising the US follows suit?

I heard 3 generations behind which is about 5 years. They also used components from south korea against sanctions. It is not fully domestic and that should hardly be a surprise.

South korean components were found in it pretty much immediately.

Chinese state media have touted the development as a sign the country had successfully “broken US sanctions” and “achieved technological independence” in advanced chipmaking

They touted about it just enough to be heard but not nearly enough for how big of a deal that would be if it actually were true. I mean most people only read about it now that the US as announced further sanctions so I have my doubt it was anything but a propaganda campaign.

Meme makers on the Chinese internet have even crowned US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo the unofficial brand ambassador for the Mate 60 series.

The memes poke fun at the idea that US sanctions, which are implemented and enforced by the US Commerce department

That isn‘t actually what the memes are really about. It was probably a backfire to photos taken of high ranking CCP officials and celebrities using iPhones because those are still huge status symbols in China. Many of them endorsed Chinese brands but privately used iPhones which is a pretty big blow to their propaganda machine. They have recently made the rounds on social media. So of course CCP shills photoshopped pictures of the US commerce secretary using Huawei who was visiting China at the moment. China also then announced their politicians are no longer allowed to carry apple products. Paired with the likelyhood that their domestic chip turns out to be a hoax, China is in quite a mess. And I didn‘t even talk about the floods in Shenzhen and Hong Kong that the CCP definitely does not want the world to see right now. It‘s a tragedy and definitely won‘t help their technology branches, many of which call these cities their homes.