whats_all_this_then

Those sites all have ridiculously low bitrates; way lower than I can personally tolerate. I've switched to torrenting everything at MUCH higher quality. Takes some effort to get good torrents and sometimes seeds are an issue but the end result is worth it. Thinking of getting a seedbox while I'm at it too.

True. Even I've been guilty of that at times. It's just hard right now to see the positives through the countless downsides and the fact that the biggest application we're moving towards seems to be taking value from talented people and putting it back into the pockets of companies that were already hoarding wealth and treating their workers like shit.

So usually when people say "AI is the next big thing", I say "Eh, idk how useful an automated idiot would be" because it's easier than getting into the weeds of the topic with someone who's probably not interested haha.

Edit: Exhibit A

The issue is that "AI" has become a marketing buzz word instead of anything meaningful. When someone says "AI" these days, what they're actually referring to is "machine learning". Like in LLMs for example: what's actually happening (at a very basic level, and please correct me if I'm wrong, people) is that given one or more words/tokens, it tries to calculate the most probable next word/token based on its model (trained on ridiculously large numbers of bodies of text written by humans). It does this well enough and at a large enough scale that the output is cohesive, comprehensive, and useful.

While the results are undeniably impressive, this is not intelligence in the traditional sense; there is no reasoning or comprehension, and definitely no consciousness, or awareness here. To grossly oversimplify, LLMs are really really good word calculators and can be very useful. But leave it to tech bros to make them sound like the second coming and shove them where they don't belong just to get more VC money.

Lots of countries just don't care about you downloading pirated content though, they just punish distribution.

I don't really have that problem but for the places that do punish downloading, I hear VPNs can be helpful to mask your traffic and that ISPs don't really care enough to pursue as long as you're not blatant about it and have plausible deniability ("no, I just downloaded a linux ISO that happened to be exactly the size of a whole season of , total coincidence")

Obviously not legal advice though.

On the bright side, new Italy unlocked

For me it's roughly 6/9 of the times it's on the table but everyone's different and you really should consult your physician before your holey activities.

That's actually amazing! Maybe I should start ranting about stuff that annoys me in software I love. Wouldn't mind being lead dev on something I'm an active user of.

How many years until we get the Veldt?

30 seconds in and subbed because "man rants about DAW UI/UX" is a genre of video that I never knew existed but suddenly can't live without.

The way I see it, don't dish it out if you can't take it...living memory or not

In reasonable amounts, yes

Yup that sounds about right for iOS.

Meant more that if Android ends up in the same boat (and by the looks of it, that's exactly what Google and Samsung want), then iOS starts to look viable because the situation becomes: all the same bullshit but iOS is polished to a shine.

Don't plan on switching phones until my less than year old Note 9 kicks the bucket 😅