The message seems clear: If you want these features you must buy more recent models. But I ask myself: how long before these new models have features removed to get me to buy even newer stuff ?
My guess would be soon as the warranty expires, given that this affects TVs released as recently as last year....
RIAA usually only owns the studio recordings, as well; the bands would own the performing rights.
The music publishers own the mechanical and/or streaming rights. That's where it could be a problem. But given that this probably drives interest that makes them money rather than taking money away, there's a decent chance they won't care unless they think it will get them a big payday somehow.
Can we quit trying to attack UIs?
I understand that an infinite scroll can be addictive. It's also an incredibly simple UI feature that has plenty of viable use-cases.
No, it really doesn't. What it does is:
There is literally never a situation where this is inherently the right thing to do (except for the company's ad-driven bottom line), because the quantity of data available is always finite. And the very design of infinite scrolling creates a perverse incentive to fill the feed with garbage and ads and padding and boosted posts and groups you might like and everything else under the sun, rather than telling you that none of your actual friends have posted anything new since you last looked.
More to the point, it disguises how much less actual use people are making of Facebook. And as people use it less, it requires padding the content with more and more garbage to hide the reduction in organic content, which reduces the production of organic content even more, eventually turning in a death spiral. But they'll hide that for as long as they can by packing in more and more fake engagement opportunities.
But we need to come to the point where we all agree that artificially trying to force someone to engage beyond the point they normally would is not "making a better product", it's just sleazy.
Agreed. Where we disagree is that I think infinite scroll inherently leads to that abuse.
The addictive nature of social media is a serious problem, but it is not the fault of social media companies.
A lot of it really is the social media companies' fault. When I look at Facebook, my feed used to be 99% stuff posted by my friends and family. Now, it is only about 20% stuff posted by my friends and family. The rest is a combination of groups that I'm in (20%), random influencers and groups and pages that are being promoted (50%), and straight-up ads (10%). There is more garbage than content. And there's no good way to get the trash out, no matter how hard you try.
And yet, that steaming pile of garbage is being shown because for some subset of the population, seeing things that drive interactions, rather than things that genuinely deeply interest the user, causes those users to come to the site more and stay on the site more.
Meta, realizing that they have hit peak user count and can't realistically grow much bigger, have to find a way to keep the stock price from cratering because of zero growth potential, so they are abusing users to try to gain more eyeball time instead. They deliberately feed the addiction of those who have short attention spans and need continuous input to stimulate them.
The moment they started chasing engagement instead of users was the point when they became a net harm to society. And all of this social media addiction stems from that. Very nearly all of the harm that they cause stems from that. It stems from sites designed to continuously route you towards content that will be more engaging to keep you on the site longer. This is not to say that there is not room for some of that on a broad scale, but doing it too narrowly leads to rabbit holes, which are a net negative.
Fixing this requires keeping companies small, and requiring that big social media companies make their networks available to smaller companies (federation) so that there is actual competition in the marketplace. But the fact that governments should have intervened decades ago doesn't mean that it isn't still the fault of the companies. They had a choice. They could have continued to do business the way they did before, knowing that their stock price would never grow. They chose to seek revenue over user happiness.
If you stalker needs face recognition to identify you; are they stalking you at all? That one does not even really make sense.
The theory is that people will see someone they find attractive and use this to figure out who they are so that they can stalk them. And yeah, that could plausibly happen, in theory.
In practice, Facebook doesn't know where I am right now, and facial recognition on a worldwide database is likely to produce hundreds of hits for every person, and that's assuming the person even has a Facebook account.
Also, in practice, the feature has almost no real-world utility. If you don't already know who a person is, you probably don't need to know that person's name, and if you do, then you are already probably connected in one way or another. Limiting this to people who are within a small-ish number of degrees of separation from you would fix both the stalking risk (for the most part) and the too-many-results problem, and I'd be surprised if they did not already do that, making their concern probably almost purely academic.
Might as well just mandate all retail be closed on Sundays. People can plan around it and it would be super nice for the retail staff to have one guaranteed day off each week that didn't rotate around.
Locals can plan for it. People who just flew in from another country may starve to death.
It would also be a nightmare for me. Weekends are when I do personal projects around the house. If I suddenly realize that I need a screw or hinge or piece of lumber that I missed in planning, and if retail is closed on Sunday, the project stops and doesn't resume until the following weekend. And now you've cost me almost an entire week.
This also means that businesses that are only open during the day Monday through Friday might as well not exist from my perspective. I'll never do business with them, because I'll never be available to do business with them.
If I were picking days, I'd say, retail should *only* be open on Saturday and Sunday, plus maybe evenings after 6. Having those businesses open during the day when everybody is at work doesn't make a lot of sense. For businesses like Lowe's and Home Depot, people who work in construction can plan for it and pick up materials the night before. At least they would be set back by only a day if they forget something, rather than a week.
If you're going to have a guaranteed day off, what would be better would be to mandate that each individual place of business have a guaranteed day off. So half the businesses might pick Saturday and half might pick Sunday. And half the Lowe's stores would pick Saturday, and half would pick Sunday. And so on.
Better yet, have a religious freedom law that requires businesses to allow individuals to guarantee that their chosen day of worship is free if requested, plus religious holidays, up to some reasonable number per year. Let businesses figure out how to deal with that. For example, people who attend worship services on Saturday — Catholics, Jews, 7th Day Adventists, occasionally Episcopalians or Lutherans, etc. — could be a hot commodity and demand higher pay because of their availability to work on Sundays. Meanwhile, other churches would be pressured to offer Saturday worship to level the playing field, and in the end, folks would have more choice in worship times.
The name is a misnomer. It isn't backlit LEDs. It is LED backlights.
Is there actually a significant market of people who really care that their TV can display 100% of the color space versus, say, 93% or whatever? This just seems like another manufacturer sales gimmick, like 3-D or 8K.
Being able to display darker blacks is actually kind of a big deal, particularly in a dimly lit room. Having crushed blacks because of inadequate ability to darken the screen makes some shows significantly harder to watch.
And it is even worse for computers. My MacBook Pro has one of those splotchy LCDs that can dim parts of the backlight, and I guess that's better than nothing, but at its dimmest backlight setting, the overall backlight still isn't dark enough to use at night in the dark by a large margin. Having an OLED panel where you just have brightness and contrast to deal with would be a real win, IMO.
No idea what the actual problem was — probably some encrypted communication misconfiguration, channel misconfiguration, stealth mode setting, bad PTT button, or other similar weirdness. And of course, the internal clocks would have drifted by probably several hundred microseconds over the course of the mission because of time dilation, so in the unlikely event that they're using encryption that is ridiculously timing-sensitive, that could also be an issue, but that seems unlikely.
If the problem was misconfigured encryption, wouldn't it have affected communication both ways? The Integrity crew could hear the rescue team, but not the other way around.
You would think, but I've definitely heard of situations where that was not the case, where first responders from fire departments could talk to police, but not the other way around, or other similar situations, and IIRC, they blamed a misconfiguration in the encryption for those problems.
I'm guessing that the encrypted radios have a key that they use for sending, and have multiple keys that they can receive, so that you can always tell which entity's radio is sending. If that's the case, then if radio A had the key to decrypt traffic from radio B, but radio B did not have the key to decrypt traffic from radio A, you could have a situation where communication only goes one way.
But I'm entirely speculating here based on vague memory of a news story from probably at least half a decade ago, so who knows if it has any basis in reality.
It was good to see all go as planned.
Except for the tactical radio failure after they landed, where they had to relay comms to Houston and back out to sea because the rescue team couldn't hear them. That was pure comedy gold. When I heard the words "Did you press the push-to-talk button," I wept with joy.
No idea what the actual problem was — probably some encrypted communication misconfiguration, channel misconfiguration, stealth mode setting, bad PTT button, or other similar weirdness. And of course, the internal clocks would have drifted by probably several hundred microseconds over the course of the mission because of time dilation, so in the unlikely event that they're using encryption that is ridiculously timing-sensitive, that could also be an issue, but that seems unlikely.
Strong reason to use plain VHF radios if they aren't already.
Anyway, I'll be curious to hear the postmortem on that one.
Antitrust enforcement can't fix very easily.
Breakups that divide users into multiple pools will just result in immediate user consolidation.
Breakups by product will result in exactly the same amount of competition that we have now, because the various parts of Facebook don't really compete with each other meaningfully, and wouldn't compete meaningfully even if they were owned by different companies. They have mostly disjoint user bases, i.e. most people either use Insta or FB exclusively or at most auto-crosspost from one to the other, but still basically use only one. And users would just keep using the one that they use, and the only difference would be a slight reduction in communication, or people adopting a third-party posting tool that posts to both, neither of which would cause one to steal users from the other in either direction.
The *only* way to solve this is through mandating that all social networks with more than a certain number of users provide federation to other similar social networks using a public API, requiring published interoperability specs for all new features (along with a published interoperability test suite), requiring that the social networks publish a list of criteria for federation, mandating compliance with reasonableness standards that govern what those criteria can include, and mandating that the social networks enable federation for any social network that meets their published criteria, without any further discrimination.
Once you do that, the network effects cease to be important, and you have a functioning free market, where anyone can build a Facebook-like site with its own interface, where users on that new site can share things with Facebook users and vice versa, and so on.
Because on paper the barrier to entry for social media is very low. It's literally just a website.
On paper, the barrier to entry is staggeringly high, which is why Facebook effectively has a monopoly on text-based social media and (via Instagram) photo-based social media, and you have to include radically different things like video sharing (short-form and long-form), private messaging, and microblogging to be able to claim that it has any competition at all.
But those things are really fundamentally different types of communication that appeal to fundamentally different audiences for fundamentally different reasons. And while they might be "competition" in that both take up your time, that's a bit like arguing that TV news competes with gym memberships. In any sane universe, they should be treated as entirely different markets. But Facebook has managed so far to convince judges and juries that they are all "social media" to avoid antitrust scrutiny, despite having killed the only viable competitor ever to exist (Google+).
The reality is that true competition in social networks — social networks fighting for the same eyes — is basically impossible unless you have government-mandated federation between social networks. What happens instead is that everyone of a particular age suddenly gets old enough to join social networks, and they join whatever is popular with young people at that point, because everyone they know is on that network. About once per generation, that social network starts being seen as "the social network for old people", and some new competition has a chance of taking the new folks. And they compete for a year or two until one becomes dominant, and then the market becomes static again.
So you get a brief moment of competition every decade or so. And that's it. The rest of the time, your choice of social network is dominated by network effects, where people choose a social network almost exclusively because everyone their age is on that network.
Can you imagine if someone said, "I'm going to create a competing telephone network that doesn't talk to the existing telephone network?" Everyone else would laugh in their faces. Yet that's exactly what social network competition is like.
So no, the barrier to entry is not and has never been low. That's why one of the wealthiest companies on the planet tried to compete head to head with Facebook and still couldn't pull it off. Anyone arguing otherwise is depending on a Frankensteinian hybrid market that treats competition as being between companies instead of between products. Facebook Reels competes with YouTube Shorts. Facebook Messenger competes with dozens of other companies. Facebook Groups competes with Discord. Facebook (as a friend-based text sharing social media platform) doesn't compete with anybody. Instagram (as a friend-based photo sharing social media platform) also doesn't compete with anybody meaningfully.
Put another way, the barrier to entry is low if you can come up with a totally different type of content to share that no other social network supports, and that takes long enough to support properly so that Facebook won't duplicate your feature and kill your momentum by week 6. Otherwise, network effects combine with monopoly market power to make the barrier to entry startlingly high. It is the "social" part that makes this true.
My gaming PC is on the opposite end of the house, so not only would I have to run a 50' HDMI cable, I'd need a 50' USB cable for my controller, since it can't pair over BT through the multiple walls between the couch and the PC. Believe me, I've tried
Ever thought about moving the gaming PC?
But seriously, there are cheap wireless KVM solutions for 1080p, and slightly less cheap 4K HDMI wireless extenders. I haven't seen any 4K + USB, but they probably exist. But I'd imagine anything wireless is going to be artifacty.
If you can run a single Ethernet cable in a crawlspace or attic, you can get a KVM extender for $153, and that presumably would be a clean, near-zero-latency HDMI and USB repeater (because it's probably just a bunch of level shifters).
They got rid of Steam Link for my Samsung TV, but release it for a device so few people own. WTF Valve?
Why would you use Steam Link for a TV and waste precious network bandwidth and suffer compression artifacts and lag just to avoid running an HDMI cable? Even if it is in different rooms, $90 plus a point-to-point Cat5 cable will solve the problem permanently without all the hassles associated with using software workarounds.
Steam Link makes perfect sense when you're talking about headsets that are mobile, but streaming to a fixed device like a TV set sounds like a niche use case that would be better served with dedicated hardware.
Do you think the new supreme leader is going to somehow be more rational than the last one?
That's the simplicity of the system I already outlined for you up above. Just repeat until one is. Iran will run out of irrational ayatollahs long before America runs out of bombs.
If by simple, you mean simplistic, then yeah. What you're forgetting is that every time a bomb kills someone's mother, father, brother, sister, wife, son, or daughter, another America hater is born. So there's likely to be an endless supply of irrational leaders, so long as they are put into power by someone bombing the previous leader along with random military targets.
The only regime changes that are ever really positive long-term are regime changes led by the people of a country against their leaders. All other regime changes are statistically more likely to make things worse than better.
The problem that we thought was a problem was, indeed, a problem, but not the problem we thought was the problem. -- Mike Smith
