Hi, we're a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.
We're not a newspaper, we're a content portal. We're not a taxi service, we're a ride sharing app. We're not a pay TV service, we're a streaming platform. We're not a department store, we're an e-commerce marketplace. We're not a financial services firm, we're crypto. We're not a space agency, we're a group of visionaries who are totally going to Mars next year. We're not a copywriting and graphic design agency, we're a large language model generative AI platform.
Oh sure, we compete against those established businesses. We basically provide the same goods and services.
But we're totally not those things. At least from a legal and PR standpoint.
And that means all the laws and regulations that have built up over the decades around those industries don't apply to us.
Things like consumer protections, privacy protections, minimum wage laws, local content requirements, safety regulations, environmental protections... They totally don't apply to us.
Even copyright laws — as long as we're talking about everyone else's intellectual property.
We're going to move fast and break things — and then externalise the costs of the things we break.
We've also raised several billion in VC funding, and we'll sell our products below cost — even give them away for free for a time — until we run our competition out of the market.
Once we have a near monopoly, we'll enshitify the hell out of our service and jack up prices.
You won't believe what you agreed to in our terms of service agreement.
We may also be secretly hoarding your personal information. We know who you are, we know where you work, we know where you live. But you can trust us.
By the time the regulators and the general public catch on to what we're doing, we will have well and truly moved on to our next grift.
By the way, don't forget to check out our latest innovation. It's the Uber of toothpaste!
The one thing I don't sympathise with in that list is the taxi services — at least here in Ottawa, they were even more exploitative than Uber or Lyft, with a small number of plate holders acting as feudal lords for the drivers, and extracting rent from their vassals even on a bad shift with few fares.
The city could have fixed that by issuing more plates, but the plate-owner lobby was too powerful.
Yes ‘medallion systems’ have huge problems. One reason they were implemented to begin with was that an unlimited fleet put everyone out of business. Uber is reintroducing that problem.
@markr Very true. Ideally, the city would have managed taxi plates (medallions), increasing the supply every year so that it approximately matched the number of drivers the market would support, instead of freezing it at an artificially-low level so that plates were selling for $500K+ on the secondary market (before Uber and Lyft wiped out their value).
@Dianora @markr I do sympathise with the extended families a bit for their financial loss, but speculating on taxi plates that the city originally received only a few hundred $$ for was like speculating on crypto only even worse, because it also involved exploiting drivers and subverting democratic gov't by applying undue influence on city councillors to create and maintain an artificial shortage.
@david_megginson @Dianora @markr The same thing happened in NYC. People committed suicide when their medallions became worthless. Essentially the city created and sold a class of property when it issued medallions, then destroyed that property—that is, the exclusive right to provide taxi service—without compensation by giving it to Uber and Lyft more or less for free.
The problem could have been solved by requiring Uber and Lyft to pay into a revenue-based fund to compensate medallion holders.
@EpiphanicSynchronicity @david_megginson @Dianora @markr this seems a particularly cursed way of "regulating" the service.. In my district a taxi licence costs about £300 for 3 years, but is only gained after passing an extra driving test, studying a part time college course in taxi operations, and having a fairly clear DBS (criminal record) check, or at least one with only spent convictions on it several years old (and no recent motoring offences). Uber have near 0 market presence round here..
That sounds like an excellent system. Despite the initial training hump and relatively modest fee every three years, Uber and Lyft drivers transferring to such a system would make more money and have more freedom, and the public would be well served.
@EpiphanicSynchronicity @david_megginson @Dianora @markr The licence is for the individual driver and is not transferrable - whilst there must be a max limit on how many are issued by each Council if anything there is a shortage of drivers due to Brexit/hostile environment for immigrants, Covid and an ageing population - but taxicabs are generally fairly priced (no more expensive than Uber), safe and reliable round here - the system we have in place works..
@EpiphanicSynchronicity @vfrmedia @Dianora @markr I agree. Uber and Lyft are much safer than the old taxi systems in most North American cities. but I'd far rather entrust my safety to a public regulator than a VC-funded tech company. It points to a failure of government (and the undue influence of the old taxi lobby). Much of Europe does it better.
You have been rated 3 stars or lower by our toothbrushing partners in the last 14 days. For this reason we are closing your Tøøther account and revoking your toothpaste access. This decision is final and there is no appeal process.
@Jonathan Lamothe My personal computers are all basically things I've gotten out of eBay and hand-me-downs. My work computer is literally someone else complained about it.
Can you add hardware to it to increase the processing power? I'm planning to take my work laptop to my computer guys to see if that's possible. I got a super cheap laptop about a year ago because the one I'd had for years broke and I didn't pay attention to the specs. 4GB of RAM is *not* sufficient to both run Zoom and play music unless you're cool with a 10-minute startup.
The whole thing just runs really slowly, especially on startup. I don't know if there's some other cause but it was like this pretty much from the moment I got it.
@CJ the Awkward Lefty startup slowdown probably means a spinning disk (a hard drive/hdd instead of a solid state drive/ssd), which makes windows start very slow
Boss: *reviewing my slides for a talk* "I don't understand any of this from my slides! This talk is bad Me: Uh... why would the slides be the talk? The slides are just some anchors and an agenda? Boss: Well yes of course they are, but looking at the slides I don't understand the topic, these are just point form!
@Patch Arcana To be fair - this is a product person trying to manage me and a team of really intense engineers and constantly flailing. But you'd think he'd at least know what a talk is
If anyone wants to learn more about #Threads, the best place to start is probably the original trilogy, starting with Dragonflight (first published in 1968). bookwyrm.social/book/61702/s/d…
Anne McCaffrey's worldbuilding is incredible, and the background hints about the world that slowly build over the course of the series are wonderfully well done.
HOW CAN ONE GIRL SAVE AN ENTIRE WORLD?To the nobles who live in Benden Weyr, Lessa is nothing but a ragged kitchen girl. For most of her life she has survived by serving those who betrayed her father and took over his lands.
Imagine other industries would be like the programing world (in regards to LLMs):
*Business guy walks into kitchen of a chef* "what's that"
Chef: "it's a pan, you can use it for cooking"
"coo... can you use more simple terms nerd?"
"you put food in, make it hot, food tasty"
"hmm ho... I can melt iron with this"
"no, you ruin the pan and it actually doesn't get ho..."
"it's also heavy, I could sell it as self defence"
"what? No, there are a million things better suited.."
"hmm yea I take this now home, bye"
"wait come back! I need that! You can't just..."
*business guy leaves the scene*
*next day the chef reads a lot of news articles about the incredible new "pan" and it's million usecases, as it will replace humans, and the dangers it poses to humanity*
As a railroader who recently weathered a very similar struggle, I am expressing my solidarity with #UPS workers in their struggle to get a fair contract. If your Scamazon package takes a little longer to get to your home later this year because they’re on strike, suck it up and maybe take a moment to appreciate what those people do for our economy. #labor #UPSstrike
Trying to setup some stupid Amazon web portal thing - and it's... a joke.
They want me to have a massive network setup - but there's no feedback about how things are setup. And - I mean, I have the gateway connected to the gateway and then a route connected to the gateway? That seems correct?
So I go and hit my home address from the portal, and I see a burst of activity in my logs, followed by nothing, because traffic is getting to the right spot but then Amazon is ignoring that.
-Introduce yourself by sharing your greatest fears and weaknesses. It is standard.
-If you wish to verify your account, simply post your social security number. We value security here, so remember to add in "I do not consent to any identity theft".
-Socialize by telling us who your favorite uncle is. It doesn't have to be your uncle. It can be anyone's uncle. Maybe you don't have an uncle. That's okay. No one will judge you for that.
my greatest fears are the children who sit on the end of my bed, my greatest weakness is in my little finger on my left hand, I have no security and am terrible at socialising, even with numbers, my favourite uncle is Napoleon Solo.
I'm surprised. I'm not a newcomer... BUT, I thought someone terrific like Uncle Raisin that played lots of classical music and English synth-pop band Blancmange in his auto named Isadora after Isadora Duncan, would be everyone's favorite uncle.
1. I frequently dream I’ve lost my math book, didn’t do any homework, am running late to class, and desperately need a bathroom but can’t find one that’s not locked or has toilets clogged with s#!t and paper. I am 58, and still dreaming this. 2. Since I am not good with numbers (see #1), any numbers I give you are probably wrong. 3. I had an uncle who was good at math and he got a high paying job designing food and coffee flavorings from toxic chemicals.
What's the status of video editting in the Open Source world? My kid seems to want to do video editting (loves the idea of making portals, he's drawing them and filming them on his tablet, but wants the shimmer)
Just keep in mind that if it was a corporate social network - the difference would be 1) the FBI would send a letter not a raid 2) you wouldn't know it had happened
One of the biggest traps I see is that communication and effective action is called incompetence
When Chapters/Indigo took down their store after a ransomware attack my dad kept telling me how incompetent it made them seem. In my opinion, they are the only sensible store I've ever seen. After that I trust their team has the resources to do their job.
Sure, an instance got raided, but they did the right things afterward. And if you can tell me where I can find a remote instance with enough disk, ram, and cpu to figure out wtf on a prod DB, you let me know
Braddadap! We revved up our motors and read New Defenders #145. Topics of discussion include: cool motorcycle stunts, Team America, Moondragon's hatred of hats, Bumblebears, and whether Spain has a Kuato. Enjoy! Enjoy! podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/…
Security is the tool by which we protect privacy and increase safety.
Saying something increases security while reducing privacy *better* come with a coherent argument about safety, otherwise you're probably a bootlicker.
no joke, many moons ago as a baby intern, i was tasked with reimaging a bunch of machines. while there was a standard for what to name them, i didn't know it until after i had done like 5 machines, which i named all of them after root vegetables
we actually got an email from network security asking why we suddenly had "potato" and "carrot" on the network
I asked ChatGPT about primes ending in 2 to make it prove a point and it proved the point far better than I could have hoped for.
Please do not be a fool who trusts ChatGPT with anything outside your field of expertise, and even then double or triple check what it tells you if you must use it.
That's pretty funny. Lest anyone think this was an unfair test of ChatGPT, mathematics is one of its core domains of expertise. (At least that's what ChatGPT told me, but maybe I should know better than to believe a pathological liar twice.)
A while ago I asked it for the 100th digit of π and it was hilariously aggressive that there is no 100th digit. It seemed to be basing that on the fact that π doesn't repeat and there are less than 100 distinct digits, but I think I broke it when I asked about base 100. It eventually informed me that there isn't even a first digit of pi, either.
I will note that the answers it gave you are both (a) shorter and (b) less arrogant sounding. ChatGPT previously was incredibly rude, unable to admit, much less contemplate, possibly being wrong.
I think the problem was that they trained it on transcripts from very smart people. It learned to mimic their charmless assertions and condescending style, but with none of their knowledge.
@bhawthorne @abananabag Yeah I always felt like the Reddit portion of GPT’s training corpus felt pretty apparent. It wasn’t trained on smart people. It was trained on very average people who themselves were trained for years that being wordy and sounding confident was the way to get upvotes, and, in essence, be correct on the internet.
@abananabag ChatGPT has no “domains of expertise.” It is merely a text generator. Fancy autocomplete. It is not a repository of knowledge, and cannot become one. Everyone keeps asking it to do things it cannot do, because OpenAI profits from lying about what the dang thing is.
People have said that GPT-4 is much better and also that numbers are hard for GPT-3.5 I've seen this today, which is GPT-4 struggling with words (a lilac avatar means it is GPT-4)
My point remains: Be skeptical of GPT's output if the answer is of a topic you can’t adequately verify.
Aw shit! A rumour that makes all of the "Wait and See maybe Meta isn't evil" look very stupid. If the rumour is true, it turns out that Meta is indeed evil. If the rumour is untrue... uh... maybe you should check any other source about if Meta is evil
oh, here's some JUICY rumored details about meta's plans for the fediverse
tl;dr "Meta will only federate with select larger instances from the beginning. There will be contracts which also provide for financial compensation for the instance owners."
can't entirely verify their validity but it's still worth posting just in case
@vantablack Any idea how Louis learned this? I tracked down the original conversation on his timeline and someone else asked him the same question--he hadn't answered yet. He seems like a decent guy but I think he's inferring/guessing rather than knowing per se.
I like Terry Pratchett's version the best: "Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
We deserve better than this. Then again maybe we don’t. The corruption gets worse everyday, and half the people who are supposed to protect us from it are in on it.
We need to check on all the justices. We need strong ethics for all judges be it federal, states or local. This is a must. investigate all be it "liberals or conservatives". Corruption like those without morals.
@lowqualityfacts, if you give a billionaire a parachute, you give him the chance to fly for a while, if you throw him out of the private jet without it, you teach him to fly for the rest of his life.
David Megginson
in reply to AJ Sadauskas • • •The one thing I don't sympathise with in that list is the taxi services — at least here in Ottawa, they were even more exploitative than Uber or Lyft, with a small number of plate holders acting as feudal lords for the drivers, and extracting rent from their vassals even on a bad shift with few fares.
The city could have fixed that by issuing more plates, but the plate-owner lobby was too powerful.
#Taxis #Uber #Lyft #Ottawa
markr
in reply to David Megginson • • •David Megginson
in reply to markr • • •@markr Very true. Ideally, the city would have managed taxi plates (medallions), increasing the supply every year so that it approximately matched the number of drivers the market would support, instead of freezing it at an artificially-low level so that plates were selling for $500K+ on the secondary market (before Uber and Lyft wiped out their value).
#Ottawa #taxis
David Megginson
Unknown parent • • •Epiphanic Synchronicity
in reply to David Megginson • • •@david_megginson @Dianora @markr The same thing happened in NYC. People committed suicide when their medallions became worthless. Essentially the city created and sold a class of property when it issued medallions, then destroyed that property—that is, the exclusive right to provide taxi service—without compensation by giving it to Uber and Lyft more or less for free.
The problem could have been solved by requiring Uber and Lyft to pay into a revenue-based fund to compensate medallion holders.
Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK
in reply to Epiphanic Synchronicity • • •Epiphanic Synchronicity
Unknown parent • • •Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK
in reply to Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK • • •David Megginson
in reply to Epiphanic Synchronicity • • •Kelvin n0mql EN35ld
Unknown parent • • •@Dianora @david_megginson @markr
Love "furiously agreeing." My soul is in tune with that sentiment.
bigiain
in reply to AJ Sadauskas • • •"By the way, don't forget to check out our latest innovation. It's the Uber of toothpaste!"
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Mina
in reply to AJ Sadauskas • • •that's a level of cynicism i've had… 2 years into working in this industry.
so, for a long time now.