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cecilkorik

@ cecilkorik @lemmy.ca

Posts
1
Comments
1144
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Is Kagi search engine worth it?

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  • Up-selling and cross-selling. It's just business. Who's ever going to pay $25/month if the $5/month plan does everything anyone ever possibly needs? Their lowest level pricing model relies on making you anxious about running out of searches eventually, not finding everything you need within that window each month, and not having effective enough tools to find what you need at the basic level. You may personally reject that you need anything more than the basic plan, but the company's financial incentive is to convince you of the opposite, and don't think for a second that they're not eventually going to try to convince you that you need to upgrade. It may seem like $5/month and $25/month are not that far apart, but multiply that across some arbitrary number of users, say, 100,000, and you're talking about $2 million dollars PER MONTH of potential revenue on the table. And there's no guarantee they're not going to eventually start pushing even more expensive products and plans.

    They have partnerships with other businesses too, and while those seem like nice enough businesses on the surface, they're still businesses and they are going to have motivation to find ways to drive traffic and prime you to get subscriptions to them too. The problem is not that these partnerships exist or that there's anything wrong with them, it's that they're another corrupting influence when money is involved and changing hands.

    To be clear, I'm not saying anyone involved is evil, that they're actively doing this now, that they are even necessarily moving in this direction, or that they're even slightly corrupt at all... yet, but they're swimming in the corrupting waters of subscription-based dark patterns and they can't help but be influenced by them. The lust for profits will inevitably drive them mad. It always does. Enshittification does not make exceptions for good intentions.

  • Is Kagi search engine worth it?

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  • No, it's just trading one centralized search product that is free and profits by using your data and manipulating you, for another that you have to pay for and profits from you more directly but still has financial incentive to keeping you engaged and searching instead of finding. Run your own decentralized SearXNG instead and take it into your own hands. Search isn't something that should be controlled by anyone who's in it for a profit.

  • EA insists it will "maintain creative control" and "creative freedom" if sale to consortium goes ahead

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  • I will maintain creative control of my life by boycotting EA forever. It's one of the key plot points in my story.

  • 28-pound electric motor delivers 1000 horsepower

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  • What if we compromise on fractional thousandths of a kilodog?

  • Say Hi to Tech Bro Carney | The Tyee

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  • So... throwing trillions at it is bad, but I'm not following the part where you implied I'm potentially ignorant. Do you, or don't you, want to fall behind one of the main countries that is throwing trillions at it, which you admit is bad? Is letting ourselves fall behind and proceeding very cautiously not reasonable? Did we not weather the 2008 financial crisis with much the same attitude?

    Instructions unclear, got afraid of falling behind and accidentally tied my much smaller economy with a very sturdy rope to a country that is soon to be falling off a cliff.

  • Say Hi to Tech Bro Carney | The Tyee

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  • Wanting to fall behind the rest of the world is a good thing when the rest of the world is charging mindlessly towards a cliff.

  • Dig Yourself Out is an amazing diagnosing tool for crashes

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  • Ukrainian computer game-style drone attack system goes ‘viral’

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  • Release game for free on Steam. Surprise! All war objectives complete in 3 days.

  • Canadian Artists Brace for Austerity: ‘Cuts Will Hurt Everyone’

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  • I'd be fine with that if we were simply spending that money entirely within Canada. Invest in some infrastructure. Give me a new job building military death robots, at this point I don't care as long as I get paid. I'll work 16 hours a day building military death robots or winding rotors for drone motors for the national defense as long as it pays me enough to put a roof over my head and food on my table. This should not be a large ask. If we're going to build affordable housing like we did in wartime and invest in defense like we're already at war we may as well have a wartime economy to go with it. Break out the fucking food rations and government workhouses already.

    But instead we let costs of living spiral wildly out of control and pretend inflation isn't exploding because the only thing in the consumer price index which isn't skyrocketing is the over-represented falling price of gas, which people aren't using as much of anymore due to WFH and EVs. Then we blow our entire budget of countless billions of dollars on other countries' designs and intellectual property and partnerships where they do all the skilled and value-added work and then we end up employing 1,000 people here if we're lucky, while we have to ask permission to fix it and pay them to train us how to use it.

    Yeah, it's our own damn fault for cancelling, selling, giving away, or letting other countries sabotage any of our designs or intellectual property of value and letting our infrastructure for building any of it rot to dust for at least half a century, and there's no easy way back from that. I get it. But knowing that doesn't make it any less infuriating.

  • Not using AI is an INCREDIBLE untapped power source!

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  • You're close to the real idea, but you've got it backwards.

    Billionaires' perspective: "Gradually reducing the human population over the coming century by 99% with wars, drugs, starvation, suicide, poverty while we develop life extension technologies to preserve and ideally immortalize the most deserving (qualifications TBD) will ultimately reduce humanity's long-term impact on the planet and be much more sustainable and leave us a lot more resources and land once we replace any jobs we might need with faster and more efficient AI and robots..."

    They've completely thought this through to their conclusion already. We're the ones who haven't. They think they're simply long-term thinkers and thoughtful environmentalists doing what must be done to save the planet. What they really are is power-mad eugenocidal technocratic maniacs who place no value on human lives or the lived human experience. Other than their own. Their technological utopia is built out of utter horrors and like many utopians they have fallen so deeply in love with their dream that they will accept any cost to reach it, and they have accepted this as the cost. Therefore, they must not succeed. Utopia is an illusion. But the cruelty they will do in pursuit of their utopia is real.

  • U.S. citizen shot from behind as he warned ICE agents about children gathering at bus stop, lawyers say

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  • you can throw away the whole bowl of punch.

    Ok. Let's do that.

  • I tried to outsmart the social media algorithm. Here's how it outsmarted me

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  • Journalism is dead. Capitalism killed it, because they did not want any reliable witnesses to or records of what they are going to do to humanity and the planet. History is written by the victors, and they have already crafted their own narrative of technological enlightenment. And we're not in that story. At least not in any way we'll recognize ourselves.

  • Poll: Views of capitalism slip, but socialism is still unpopular as Zohran Mamdani gains prominence

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  • Neither capitalism nor socialism are a universally applicable perfect solution. They both have noble goals on paper, and horrible failings in practice. Balancing the two, using elements of both, within limits, with regulation, with moderation, is the only approach that makes sense to me given what we know about both approaches. Like any balancing act, staying on top of the balance takes continuous effort and will never remain stable, sometimes you need to push in one direction, sometimes the other, sometimes you overcorrect. We overcorrected way too far towards capitalism during and after the cold war, and now we're falling and I don't think we're going to be able to catch ourselves. But we'll still have to get up after the fall and try again. I don't know if there's a better "third way" but if there is, I'm confident the path to it will be found somewhere in between the two, not at the extremes.

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    Discussion - Verified lemmy posts?

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  • Solution in search of a problem in my opinion. I don't see any problem. Lemmy's perfectly fine the way it is right now. If there becomes some problem eventually, we can figure out how to solve it when it happens with a more clear understanding of what the problem actually is.

  • Black Press

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  • From the name and widespread newspaper ownership alone it feels like there must be some connection to Conrad Black but I can't find it. Is it just a coincidence?

  • Are bots on lemmy?

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  • I'm a meat popsicle.

  • Reddit CEO says chatbots are not a traffic driver

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  • Obligatory "fuck spez"

  • Here’s what ads on your $2,000 Samsung smart fridge will look like

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  • Eventually people might learn why they should not just prefer to have, but actually require open systems for all the computers in their lives, even the ones hidden inside of their appliances, instead of buying these locked down, pre-programmed, remote-updated internet-of-shit devices.

    If you can't get root and boot access on your device, decide what you're updating it with and when, you don't own it or control it in the first place. You're just letting some shitty company (and maybe anyone at all with the amount of security flaws these devices have) directly into your home and network to decide what you can or can't do with your product (and when and how much it's going to cost), while they take advantage of every opportunity they can think of to spy on you and extract money from you. Any device with microchips in it isn't just an appliance anymore, it's a trojan horse full of gross and creepy salesmen and they're going to be there forever, watching you and figuring out ways to get more of your money.

  • Oh it's bad out there.

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  • Some of them come up and show me “cool” or “funny” videos that are straight AI slop and I just have to grin weakly and give a courtesy chuckle.

    Don't pretend you like it. As someone with a still-functioning brain, you have a responsibility to use it to educate people on how harmful this shit is, not just to themselves but to society.

    I'm not saying launch into a full blown tirade about it unless the person is receptive and interested in why you feel that way, but you don't have to pretend you see any value in it either, the only message you really have to convey is something like "I'm pretty sure that's AI and I don't like or watch AI videos if I can help it". You can be a single voice of reason, one casual dismissal at a time. People are social animals, they often take even subtle cues from the people around them to heart. It's one way to try to get them thinking again. Be comfortable to be seen as the person with no sense of humor if that's how you think people will take it.

    Even if all it does is make them a little more hesitant to freely share their lovely AI slop with other people, because they are worried the other people might react like you did, that's a huge win. Help stop the spread of the slop: Be judgy and judge someone for it. It's an activity that deserves to be judged.

  • OpenAI lays groundwork for juggernaut IPO at up to $1 trillion valuation

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  • ...pop!