yep, our instance and a ton of mastodon instances are hosted on hetzner (though I think we’re in their Finnish datacenter?) and recently Google made a change that seems to be returning that same German text as the description for every YouTube video requested by a hetzner IP
it’s definitely annoying and user-hostile, but that’s Google for ya
I regret to inform you that you’ve been promoted to VP of Innovation
The new Alexa service will only cost you $5 to $10 a month — and not the present price of $0.
it’s also fucking remarkable how doomed this is. did they talk to none of the people responsible for frog boiling over at Prime Video? come on, we all know the steps:
but amazon’s not doing the above obvious shit they always do in this case, and I think I know why: unlike streaming, people fucking hate voice assistants, so this $5-$10 fee might just be a desperate strategy to get true believers paying (or they’re fine with killing Alexa by making the subscription version mandatory)
Amazon is releasing a new backend for its Alexa home assistant in October, to be called “Remarkable!” This will run on Anthropic’s Claude LLM chatbot. The new Alexa service will only cost you $5 to $10 a month — and not the present price of $0. [Reuters, archive]
oh this is going to go remarkably poorly. the only time I’ve seen some of my family effectively boycott a technology was when they realized all the Alexa shit they got for cheap was fucking terrible and wouldn’t stop pushing ads to them, actively trying to get them to order shit, and lighting up their bedroom with a bright notification light (for either a package status they didn’t care that much about or more ads) they couldn’t turn off. so they boxed up all their Alexa shit and asked if I needed any of it for scrap parts (I did not)
a quick follow-up tying in with our previous post about Kroger planning AI-driven demand pricing for groceries: of course they got caught red handed price gouging
fosstodon is the programming dot dev of mastodon and I mean that in every negative way you can imagine
your posts all give me slimy SEO vibes and you haven’t shown any upward trajectory since claiming that only generative AI lacks a separation between code and data (fucking what? seriously, think on this) so you’re getting trimmed
so as I was reading that I was forming a sneer along the lines of “ghosts transcending both time and death to show me the consequences of my worldview is a classical fallacy, checkmate Dickens” but they just fucking go for it there at the end
jesus fuck, this is racist in so many different ways simultaneously that I’m trying to imagine what living like this person must feel like, living this existence where they assume all the “poor-looking” (yeah) people sharing public transit with them must be smoking crack and stealing fare and therefore deserve slavery
like fuck, that kind of existence is just a pit of despair you can’t leave, isn’t it?
e: and literally the only thing that happened to them is they had to pull up a receipt on their phone or whatever! and meanwhile people who look poor (to them) had the audacity to exist near them! fucking ordinary shit is what made them like this! minor inconveniences produced this Level of racial hatred! what in the fuck!
Yes, you unfortunately are seeing right. A person (name of whom I will censor even though you can find their name easily by going to the issue page) went onto the Hyprland bug tracker, to call me, a Nazi.
ah, this is the part of the Wayland community that’s now notorious for being a Nazi bar, specifically because their discord and every other community space did in fact have a gigantic number of nazis (some of whom were moderators) “joking” about, among other things, gassing people
e: (and also just a fuckton of outright bigotry, see Drew’s posts on this for a sample of what I mean)
here’s Drew Devault’s take on that blog post and also his first blog post that covered the ways in which Hyprland is a Nazi bar
it’s remarkable that the post spends so many paragraphs priming the reader into thinking Tim’s an irreplaceable part of the Python community and should never have been suspended, and now at least two people have gotten to that exact sentence and gone “no actually fuck Tim”
if memory serves, it gets much more mask off from there, but I remember I didn’t finish the entire thing before I closed the tab and started blocking Tim’s fans
things that are games:
things that aren’t games:
right! without that, all they can show they’re outputting is averaged, imperfect video fragments of a bunch of doom runs. and maybe it’s cool (for somebody) that they can output those at a relatively high frame rate? but that’s sure as fuck not the conclusion they forced — the “an AI model can simulate doom’s engine” bullshit that ended up blowing up my notifications for a couple days when the people in my life who know I like games but don’t know I hate horseshit decided I’d love to hear about this revolutionary research they saw on YouTube