AmbitiousProcess (they/them)

Actual downloadable software or just a website?

I’ve heard of Soundiiz before for migrating playlists to something like YouTube, though it’s paid for larger playlists, and after that yt-dlp will work well for the now non-DRM protected playlists on sites like YouTube Music, but not on DRM-protected ones like Spotify, or ones that only show samples by default like Deezer.

If you ever find that an artist on other platforms isn’t on Bandcamp, you’ll usually find them on Qobuz’s Download Store since that’s a common place that they also tend to publish.

It’s a little less convenient than Bandcamp, and is often a little more randomly priced across artists and even individual songs from an artist, but if your goal is to compensate them and get a high quality audio download, it’ll be another option.

They also have a streaming offering with way better payout rates for artists at what tends to be around $0.01873 per stream as of last year, in case you’re not ready to ditch streaming, though I can’t speak to how good it is as I haven’t tried it myself.

To be fair, the SEC has only really gone after cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin, which is the only major blockchain that uses the energy-intensive Proof-of-Work. The things the SEC was trying to regulate, that it considered securities, are almost entirely running on Proof-of-Stake networks, which have negligible relative energy consumption.

This will almost certainly have a lot of other negative impacts, but I doubt it will have that much on the climate.

This is very true.

I was part of the OpenAssistant project, voluntarily submitting my personal writing to train open-source LLMs without having to steal data, in the hopes it would stop these companies from stealing people’s work and make “AI” less of a black box.

After thousands of people submitting millions of prompt-response pairs, and after some researchers said it was the highest quality natural language dataset they’d seen in a while, the base model was almost always incoherent. You only got a functioning model if you just used the data to fine-tune an existing larger model, Llama at the time.

Relevant xkcd:

I think the key reason this was seen as not being terribly offensive was the fact that women are disproportionately more likely than men to be on the receiving end of tons of different negative consequences when dating, thus to a degree justifying them having more of a safe space where their comfort and safety is prioritized.

However I think a lot of people are also recognizing now that such an app has lots of downsides that come as a result of that kind of structure, like false allegations being given too much legitimacy, high amounts of sensitive data storage, negative interactions being blown out of proportion, etc. I also think that this is yet another signature case of “private market solution to systemic problem” that only kind of addresses the symptoms, but not the actual causes of these issues that are rooted more in our societal standards and expectations of the genders, upbringing, depictions in media, etc.

This feels most likely to me.

Meta doesn’t exactly want to taint their brand image with purely sexual content being generated by their base models, so it’s probably for either content classification, and/or the also likely fine-tuning of their LLMs and other generative models in reverse - that is to say, fine tuning them to not create content that is like what they’re then being fed.

“It’s such a big issue that I’m going to do absolutely nothing as a parent to stop it from happening!”

• These people, probably

Every accusation is a confession.

There’s a lot of things that have helped me, so I guess I’ll just dump some of that here.

First of all, make sure that you keeping up to date is deliberate, and consensual. News should not unconsensually cram itself into your eyeballs. Try out an RSS reader to keep what would be newsletter subscriptions or social media feed scrolling for the news in one single app that isn’t part of your other online activities, or keep relevant news sites bookmarked rather than followed or subscribed to.

When you feel you want to be more informed about what’s currently going on, you can then chose to be so without it happening at times you’re not ready for it.

Eliminate redundant media. So much of the media we consume isn’t truly new to us, whether that’s following people you already agree with then just liking all their posts, or reading news articles about something you already know about, just because they drop a very tiny morsel of additional information in there, burying the lead, so you have to constantly come back again and again to be truly up to date.

If you’re reading an article, watching a video, or scrolling social media, and you realize that what you’re reading is something you already know, that should be a sign to stop and take a break for a while, so the news cycle can progress further, rather than you very closely following its every little step. This is something that can take some mental training before you eventually get it down, so just try to be more aware of what you’re consuming when you consume it.

A lot of the news we see can also be something that, while technically interesting or engaging, simply doesn’t matter to us or our ability to impact others around us. Like how a TV station might show you a sad story about someone who had something bad happen to them at some time in some random small town you’ve never heard of. Sure, it’s news, but do you really need to know about that? Is that keeping you sane and energized for what comes next?

And speaking of being energized: do shit. If you care about politics and there’s a local rally or protest march, go to it. If you have a local rights organization that does outreach work, volunteer. If you can phonebank for a political candidate you like, make a few phone calls in your spare time.

I particularly like this quote from Joan Baez, which is “Action is the antidote to despair.” Even if you have a healthy diet of media consumption, are up to date without feeling overwhelmed, and are generally a well-informed individual, you can always still feel that nagging feeling that things aren’t changing.

You’ve done everything you can to know what’s going on, and yet what’s going on isn’t getting any better. There’s no point being informed if it doesn’t help you, your community, or the world at all, so when you’re able to, do literally anything you can to make even the smallest difference using what you know. If someone says something you don’t agree with politically, ask them why they believe that and use what you just learned from current events to back up your opinion. Who knows, they might change their mind.

I was ecstatic when Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary in NYC, but I was even happier because after I’d informed myself about the race, his policy positions, and what prior mayors had done so terribly wrong, I had phonebanked for him, and was in a small way, somewhat responsible for that success. And can you guess how much less despair I feel when I see things in the world imploding around all of us now?

Doing anything can make you understand how much of an impact you can have just as an individual, and that makes any bad news infinitely less damaging to your mental health. That said, don’t feel bad when you can’t, we’re all people, and we have our limits and responsibilities.

And even without all that, the best advice I can give you is to just be aware of scale. We live in an age where problems well outside our control are something we’re aware of all the time. If something is a problem, sure, be aware of it, but don’t beat yourself up over how little you’re capable of doing as an individual. It’s like when recycling was proposed as a responsibility of individuals rather than corporations, and now people feel bad for throwing out the plastic waste that the corporations made.

Don’t doomscroll, reduce pointless media, take action where you can, and don’t beat yourself up when things don’t change overnight. Just do what you can. You’ve got this.

I would say the verdict is a solid yes.

(Post for anyone interested in reading more on their own)

But that’s the thing: GrapheneOS doesn’t exist to “escape google,” it exists to give people privacy.

If it were designed to escape google, they wouldn’t create a re-implementation of Google Play Services that you can optionally install for apps that need it and regularly maintain it with every OS update.

GrapheneOS doesn’t remove Google services because “Google specifically bad,” they remove Google services because they spy on you without consent, and GrapheneOS is meant to prevent spying.

Hell, if any ROM wanted to get away from Google, basing itself on Android, the thing developed by Google would then be the problem, and they would be better off trying to make an independent Linux distro.

It fundamentally makes sense for GrapheneOS to work on Google hardware first, because Google controls not just the hardware supply chain of the phones, but also the software supply chain. (AOSP)

Supporting, say, Samsung phones, would then mean not just, to a degree, relying on Google via AOSP, but also Samsung’s hardware. Android-based ROMs can’t really benefit from trying to get away from a particular company, because it’s either Google, or Google + Phone Manufacturer that they then have to deal with. (not to mention the fact that Pixels run the best with stock android and are simply the most feasible device for a small development team to support with the lowest possible costs)

That depends on how you interpret people as either being or not being ignorant.

If you judge it solely based on how much time is spent consuming digital media, then people would be less ignorant considering that number has more than doubled since 2008. (doesn’t take into account things like print media, but I doubt people were spending at least 3 hours reading print media every single day, then switched a whole at least 3 hours of that over to digital media)

If you base it on the amount of social relationships they have with diverse groups of people that could lead them to be less ignorant about the world around themselves, then we’ve trended towards being more ignorant in that regard, because while people are more likely to have at least 4 close friends now, they’re less likely to have a wide network (10+) by nearly 3X less.

There’s also the fact that ignorance doesn’t necessarily mean “bliss” in all circumstances.

For example, people are more likely to feel satisfied waiting for a bus (or anything, really) if they’re provided an predictable, but longer estimated arrival time, compared to an unpredictable, but shorter arrival time (to an extent). In that case, the ignorance actually makes people less happy with the experience, even if it still resulted in a faster travel time than the known alternative.

The saying “ignorance is bliss” primarily applies to ignorance of problems within one’s life or society as a whole. If someone’s not aware of the atrocities committed by their government overseas, they’ll feel less stress or anger when voting or thinking of what the future might hold. If you were told you would die in exactly 24 hours, you’d probably spend more of that 24 hours worrying than simply living normally, and would be comparably less happy at the end as a result.

It’s hard to pin down any one reason in particular, but if we want to know why people are so unhappy, maybe we should reassess how ignorant people are in the first place, and what exactly they are ignorant about.

See, there’s a trend we can see with overall dissatisfaction, and it’s heavily tied to economic factors. The more wealth and economic disparity there is in a nation, the less happy the people there seem to be. (See: the World Happiness Report)

Coincidentally, places like the US are some of the most unhappy in the developed world, and also have high levels of wealth inequality

The same WHR report even shows that the density of social connections helps a lot with making people happier. (pg. 142-144) Remember the figure I brought up before about people having smaller social networks?

I can’t even begin to break down every single possible factor that’s making people unhappy, but from reports like the WHR, I think it’s clear that a lot of the things that affect people’s happiness are things that are hard to be ignorant of.

You can probably count up about how many friends you have, know about how wealthy you are, and feel dissatisfied, even if you’re the type of person that doesn’t care about politics, which is one of the largest drivers of dissatisfaction in people who are actually aware.

Remember that people are now consuming much more politics-related media nowadays, and you’ve got a lot of people who are:

• keenly aware of their own personal problems that they simply can’t be ignorant of
• tuned in to conflicts and political drama that may not even affect them, or anyone if it’s entirely political posturing
• severely economically disadvantaged, while being repeatedly shown the lives of those with substantially more than them as a goal to aspire to (think hustle culture)

And don’t even get me started on how much the COVID-19 pandemic forced people to be alone and confront their own internal problems that they were previously ignorant of.

To boil this all down to something a bit more coherent: (apologies for the long rambling)

People aren’t necessarily ignorant of the things that can cause dissatisfaction, EVEN IF they’re ignorant of larger, important issues with the world, or even smaller issues that could still impact them. We are now more connected, economically unequal, and isolated than we have been in the past, and that will take its toll no matter how ignorant you are.

Could you elaborate on how it’s ableist?

As far as I’m aware, not only are they making a version that doesn’t even require JS, but the JS is only needed for the challenge itself, and the browser can then view the page(s) afterwards entirely without JS being necessary to parse the content in any way. Things like screen readers should still do perfectly fine at parsing content after the browser solves the challenge.

Because the easiest solution for them is a simple web scraper. If they don’t give a shit about ethics, then something that just crawls every page it can find is loads easier for them to set up than a custom implementation to get torrent downloads for wikipedia, making lemmy/mastodon/pixelfed instances for the fediverse, using rss feeds and checking if they have full or only partial articles, implementing proper checks to prevent double (or more) downloading of the same content, etc.

For anyone like me that immediately assumed Gemini meant Google’s AI model by the same name, fear not, it’s a protocol, not an AI model.

Yes.

Even if it didn’t explicitly stop my biometric data from being taken and transferred to a government database every single time I fly, it would be a vote against the system itself existing. The whole reason they are allowing people to opt out right now is to test how acceptable it is to people, to hopefully make it mandatory given too little pushback from the public.

Opting out doesn’t just protect your biometric data now, it protects everyone in the future from having their biometric data taken from them without a choice if this system is allowed to spread unopposed.

I was thinking this too! Gait recognition can completely bypass facial coverings as a means of identification, but I also don’t think it’ll be much help here.

Gait recognition can be bypassed by things as simple as putting a rock in your shoe so you walk differently, so when you think about how much extra heavy gear, different shoes, and different overall movement patterns ICE agents will possibly be engaging in, it might not hold up well at tracking them down, especially since to recognize someone by gait, you’d need footage of them that you can already identify them in, to then train the model on.

In the case of fucklapd.com, this was easy because they could just get public record data for headshot photos, but there isn’t a comparable database with names directly tied to it for gait. I will say though, a lot of these undercover agents might be easier to track by gait since they’ll still generally be wearing more normal attire, and it might be more possible to associate them with who they are outside of work since it’s easier to slip up when you’re just wearing normal clothes.

This wouldn’t be an issue if Reddit always attached relevant posts, including negative ones even if those were the minority, to actually help people make a more informed judgement about an ad based on community sentiment, but I think we all know that won’t be the way this goes.

Posts will inevitably only be linked if they are positive, or at the very least neutral about the product being advertised, because that’s what would allow Reddit to sell advertisers on their higher ROI. The bandwagon effect is a real psychological effect, and Reddit knows it.

Fair enough. SEO was definitely one of the many large steps Google has taken to slowly crippling the open web, but I never truly expected it to get this bad. At least with SEO, there was still some incentive left to create quality sites, and it didn’t necessarily kill monetizability for sites.

This feels like an exponentially larger threat, and I truly hope I’m proven wrong about its potential effects, because if it does come true, we’ll be in a much worse situation than we already are now.