It’s one of those “stick it to the man”-things. People really love to brag about that and in this case it also saves quite a lot of money. People love to talk about how they saved money.

The issue is that there are apps promising you an calorie count via photo.

That behaviour shouldn’t be possible in a browser that has its users interests in mind. The browser could limit the extentions websites could monitor for to a sensible amount. Or disable that feature at all. Or block fingerprinting by default by providing false data. But if you have the worlds biggest spy company building your browser, you will get a browser that spies

They are reporting “family daily active users” and I assume that this “family” means all of their apps. They are reporting 3.56 billion DAU, but Whatsapp alone has 3.3 billion users according to some sources. So we really do not know how Facebook or Instagram are doing from those numbers - and it does make sense that user numbers are dropping when Russia is restricting access to WhatsApp & Co and Iran is switching off its internet.

Account bans? Which accounts will be banned?

Not really. Blockchain technology has one use case and that is collaboration between partners who don’t trust each other. So we’re talking crypto coins, where not all nodes are really trustworthy and there is an incentive to cheat. But there’s no reason to bring this tech to your Git repository because you really do not want untrustworthy participants in your code. Only you should have access to your Git rep, and then the easier solution is to host it yourself and use a normal database.

You might want to read the Guardian on “the cost of the crown” about royal finances:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/series/cost-of-the-crown

The average American generates about $1,605 a year in advertising value. A 35- to 44-year-old man in Bozeman, MT, without children, using a desktop and making high-value corporate searches, generates an estimated $17,929.30. An 18- to 24-year-old father in Fort Smith, AR, using an Android phone and making low-value searches, generates $31.05.

Just imagine how much people have to buy through ads to justify this amount of ad spending.

It’s even worse. They’ve built themselves a nice little business empire based on tax dodging: Taxes are collected “in the name of the king” by “his majesties” tax collectors and in that setup the king doesn’t have to pay taxes if he doesn’t want to. So they are totally raking in billions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Estate

Sure - first of all, your job application might be rejected as spam when you are naming yourself Sauron McSauronface. Depending on which character you are naming yourself after, people might also think that you are an idiot. If you name yourself Patrick Bateman, they might not want you to work in that kindergarden because your choice tells them a lot about you.

I know that text to speech does work without AI, but the modern AI-based models are so much better.

Yeah, that really does not look good. Something like that should never have been released in that state and that is a serious problem with processes.

Yeah, and the worst thing about this is that Github is critical infrastructure. If Github goes down the drain, so many devs and projects will be affected

People really have no idea what AI is. And in many cases those “AI features” are just machine learning. I’m currently running Ubuntu and I have several AI features running. One of them then is Handy.comptuer and it’s a really nice push to talk voice recognition software. I’m dictating this post with it and it’s awesome.

Another feature is image classifications integrated in Immich. It’s nice to have your personal photo library and all the pictures that you have ever taken classified so that you can search for “dog” or “hamster” or “John”. There are great text-to-speech programs out there. Everything is running locally and stuff like that is really useful to have in your OS. And it won’t boil the planet, the energy requirements are quite low.

I really struggle to see the point of posts like this. It is an interesting article about an interesting topic.

I really struggle to see what the benefit of federation would be here. That would mean that you would have several eCommerce pages with a federated product catalog? And if I buy on site A I might buy from someone on site B?

And what is the fundamental difference between the background music styled songs from the YT Audio Library that were done for a small penny in a short time by some underpaid performer vs. something a computer created?

Yeah, about that: In most jurisdictions copyright lasts until 70 years after death. So that means in 2026 that both composer and all performers must have died before 1956. Using such old songs from old recordings is simply not feasible for most companies.

There are also good reasons for people to use AI music. If you just want some music as background in a video you want to post somewhere, that totally is a legal nightmare here where I live. If you’re some small business, that is even more nightmarish. Licensing songs is expensive and hard to do, so just generating some ok tune is the best way forward

FYI: Epstein was also in jail. Saying that only women were punished is not correct.