Saw this with my cafe, people were posting what, to me, were obviously fake reviews, because they said they came in last week but posted old social media photos with plants we no longer had, and mentioned dishes they ordered that hadn't been on the menu for over a year. Increasingly they only gave 3 stars, so I guess the main goal was to build up a reputation for that profile without causing any obvious red flags. I tried reporting the reviews a couple of times, but the only options Google gives are basically spam, off-topic, unhelpful, vulgar language, conflict of interest, mobbing, discrimination - all without any ability to comment on *why* specifically you are reporting them. To this day the review is still up there, since Google apparently doesn't provide any way to provide an explanation or proof of wrongdoing, short of calling a lawyer... It's a pretty shitty/shady system that is completely ripe to be taken advantage of, with little to no proper recourse or support for the affected businesses.

Interesting, thanks for the insight!

So I did some digging and apparently iTunes Match does let you upload/backup any music, even if it's not on the Apple store. The files themselves remain DRM-free and downloadable anytime, but the cloud copies disappear when the subscription is cancelled.

However, apparently the Apple Music subscription itself also includes the ability to sync and stream your own music from the cloud - however, I believe this requires you have a computer with the Apple Music app installed on it, and of course the backups are lost if you cancel your subscription. This would make iTunes Match a bit redundant, although it is technically possible to subscribe to both services and use iTunes Match as a kind of safeguard, so that if you cancel Apple Music you don't lose your backed up tunes.

Forgot to add, you can match mp3s from pretty much any source and in any quality, and they will all be upgraded to 256kbps AAC and backed up for you permanently in the cloud, even if you cancel your subscription. :)

Not sure where this whole aspect of signing with a label ties into this story, I don't get the impression that these bands are looking to do that in any case.

Spotify is Swedish. But thanks for the tip.

Deerhoof is not no name, at least to me. They've been around for a long time and even played a gig at my college back around 2004. Also this could provide some more publicity. Just like when Vulfpeck put out a silent Spotify album to hack the system into paying them more royalties - I think that's how I found out about them in the first place, and have since becomd a fan.

Sorry, didn't read far enough to see the part about Linux. But iTunes Match should also still work on iTunes, as the name suggests. Then there is no need to transfer the mp3s, it's all in the cloud and available alongside any other purchased music, as long as the artist's tracks are indeed also available on the Apple Music store, iirc.

For 25 dollars a year you can use the Apple Music app on Windows and it's iTunes Match feature.

Same concept as Epson, but with better software, build quality, print quality and scan quality. I've had both and it's no contest. Highly underrated, excellent machines!

Already exists https://youtube.com/shorts/o6X...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ... despite worries about relocating people (at least 330,000) and environmental impact. For better or worse, the Chinese are still carrying the torch of Soviet ideology, and the result is that they get a lot more done more quickly than anywhere else, because "resistance is futile" when a project gets the green light from on high. At the very least, we can look to China to see the cutting edge of what various experiments in grand-scale infrastructure projects can achieve, or fail to achieve. It's like a real-life simulation of pie-in-the-sky ideas that would never get past the political quagmires in the West.

It's just us old 5-digit Slashdot users, looks like. :D

Just because you didn't use Pocket doesn't mean it wasn't useful.

It was, for me, like an easier-to-use version of Evernote, with the specific use case of "read it later".

Why is this better than just saving bookmarks, you may ask?

1) The pages' contents are saved for posterity, so even if a link degrades or becomes locked behind a paywall, if you could access the page at the time you saved it, you will have saved it for eternity... erm, or until the service is shut down.
2) The UI is much more suitable for leisure reading, with nice previews of the saved pages, and the pages themselves formatted in an easy-to-read style, without ads or other distractions. As others have noted, this is now a standard feature of most browsers, but Pocket lets you skip that extra step of having to wait for the full, noisy version to load first. Bonus: ability to easily send articles to your e-reader.

Now, I must admit that I only ever saved a handful of pages to Pocket (20 or so, over something like 9 years), almost always for the specific reason that I wanted to save articles that were somehow in danger of becoming inaccessible for one reason or another. But I'm still surprised there weren't more people out there who saw its utility and made more use of it -- especially considering that, unlike Evernote, it's completely free.

Why do we even want AGI?

Just because some well-worn sci-fi trope sees it as "inevitable"?

Isn't it more useful to have AI targeted at specific use cases, as tools for humans, rather than some self-aware intelligence that inevitably brings up ethical questions about "machine rights", and ends up being just as unreliable as humans themselves?

I don't think the current crop of AI is necessarily a dead end, although the brute force approach to training does indeed seem to have reached its limits. It very well may be that the current tech gets better and better at passing the Turing test, so that a few years from now, even AI experts have a difficult time telling the difference.

But if we're investing such massive resources in this stuff, let's focus on building in some reliability checks, such as hard-coding it to immediately inform you that it's an AI on the other end of the line, limiting bots' access to potentially dangerous external systems -- i.e. putting strict rules on how much "agency" an AI can have, and on the whole building in some sense of what is right and wrong, i.e. what could cause human harm, rather than just letting it mindlessly imitate all the idiocy that can be found on the internet and attempting to band-aid it by censoring it on a subject-by-subject basis.

These are the kinds of things we should be focused on, not some pipe dream of a new intelligence that acts like a human with an off-the-charts IQ.

As strange as it seems, this isn't the first time I've heard of this kind of thing. I'm assuming enough studies have used this technique already that any influence would be ruled out out at least statistically taken into account.