How long do you stay on a platform before the outreach to new people is outweighed by implicit support of the platform?

It’s a tough call. It is difficult to reach out to outsiders and talk to them but it’s the only way to have a conversation with them.

Family member spends all day every day recording and editing videos for youtube. Never finds an audience. Never gets promoted. The service is too busy pushing AI slop. All that video storage for the long tail of content with almost no views must cost a fortune. Meanwhile big quality youtubers seem to not be growing for some time like they have hit a ceiling. I think Youtube has been in decline for some time. Instead of fix it, which would require investment and ideas, I think they pull the usual bad US MBA style management practice and attempt to maximise revenues on the way down until they finally kill it.

I am in Australia. Searches on local content and niche tech subjects don’t do very well compared with other engines. It might be lack of tuning more than index and I am sure it will improve. Latency might be due to lack of local servers or resources or my choice of browsers but Qwant breaks all the time. It runs a lot better if I keep ad blocking on. Noticeably faster and more reliable though still high latency on the first result showing. If you turn ads on to support smaller companies you immediately get punished. Ad supported businesses aren’t compatible with good quality service unfortunately, no matter where they are based.

It is amazing that Google was so usable for so long really. Their search people must have fought hard to balance out product quality against the demands of the money people for a long time. I think every service that follows in Google’s footsteps will inevitably repeat all their mistakes.

I recommend trying Qwant, Ecosia and others though. It is my default browser search at the moment, mostly because it isn’t US based. It might be all you need.

There are a few probs with qwant unfortunately and I assume ecosia might be the same. It isn’t available in all countries so it’s sometimes blocked when I am on a VPN. The performance is shocking on the other side of the world. Terrible latency. Often fails completely to return results. Then the search results aren’t really good enough either. Tends to return a lot of links from similar sources like it doesn’t have much of an index. Its ok for really simple mainstream searches but I regularly need to fall back to no AI ddg or udm14 google.

Unless I want a clanker response. Actually I never want a clanker response but web indexing has become so poor in the pursuit of ad revenue then AI that sometimes it’s hard to get anything useful out of search queries these days. It’s very frustrating.

Shit started to go wrong as far back as the 50s most places, perhaps earlier in the US. Light rail, tram networks were ripped up all over the world in favour of private motor vehicles and US style real estate development with their car centric dead burbs and no local life.

Once you go all in on car centric planning it is difficult to go back. Housing development is a long way from quality entertainment, shopping, food, culture, work so people need to travel long distances but everything is so distributed and low density that its hostile to public transport networks.

Americans are correct. You can’t simply swap to bikes and public transport on top of 70+ years of insane urban planning. Some older inner cities and very small towns can be fixed. The rest is a problem.

Every company does that. The difference is the AI companies will be broke soon and laying off all their staff so people are getting out before the collapse.

I think we have been taught from birth that we can and should have it all. The most expensive car, the biggest house, the most powerful phone. It is a lie and its becoming increasingly unattainable for more people. It is pure consumerism and doesn’t make anyone happier. In truth people are lucky to have any sort of home which is a fucking travesty and an indictment on our society and politics. A 3 year old phone is still a phone. In a city you often don’t need a car at all, certainly you don’t need a lease for a massive truck that consumes all your income.

Windows has more and better software available than Linux (most free and open source software also runs on Windows). Most people don’t need it. Downscale your life and be happy.

All these craptastic US tech companies originally started on internationally developed free and open source software. They hoover up capital and talent then abuse their market power. Fuck them all.

They all run on Linux - Torvalds is a Swedish speaking Finn. Greg KH who maintains stable is German. So many libraries and core system contributions by Germans like Drepper and Poettering. Youtube ran on mysql for years from Finnish Widenius. Google built a lot of stuff with Python - from Dutch Guido van Rossum and c++ from Danish Stroustrup. All of the video and audio sites rely heavily on ffmpeg, orginally from French Fabrice Bellard. Lots of them also using virtualisation stuff which includes qemu, also from Bellard. So much comp sci research from Europe and UK. Chrome and Safari originated with KDE (German) code. Europe did all the heavy lifting while the US took all the profits. I’m not even European but every country has the same experience. They have no idea how they are viewed.

I think a lot of gear will be server/AI specific and won’t run in peoples home computers. GPUs with no graphics driver support, no video output etc. Some memory finding itself into HBM modules instead of DDR5. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have an agreement with the semiconductor cartels to crush it all so it doesn’t land in the consumer market.

Massive opportunity cost. People will say that could have been spent on social programs and I agree but realistically that can’t happen until voters stop being manipulated sheeple and wake the fuck up. Which in the USA is never. Brainwashed and neutered.

Until then that capital could have been invested in other industries, creating sustainable jobs and long term economic growth. But it is tied up in a bubble and a huge amount of wealth will be destroyed, invested in rapidly depreciating equipment and data centres that have no prospect of returning their investment.

If you thought it was hard to source computer parts at reasonable prices, imagine what the capital market must be like for anyone but the AI con artists. So when AI tanks, everything else is in limp mode, so the economy will be doubly fucked.

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Could go down a lot further, a lot quicker when OpenAI Enrons. The whole tech space is a house of cards. Better to get out early and lose a little than be caught late and lose a lot.

At the moment it’s a better browser than all the alternatives with more market share for my uses. Huge vote of no confidence in both the foundation and management. They need a cleanout and put people focussed purely on web tech and user experience in there.

They are trying to destroy the last credible non-shit browser engine. How do we rescue Mozilla from their board and management?

Rebuilding trust for most companies means some bullshit marketing campaign. New catch phrase. Some promotion. It rarely means admitting fault and changing direction. It would take something really huge for that to happen. Perhaps a combination of AI bubble burst, leadership change, shareholder revolt.

Everything anti-consumer in Windows is a deliberate choice aimed at extracting more revenue from customers. This isn’t unique to Microsoft. They exist to make money for their shareholders.

If like me you think a lot of companies have been incredibly short sighted and are burning their brands and customer loyalty for short term gains, just look at the stock prices. Short termism is making a killing for tech companies while the rest of the economy is treading water. Is it sustainable? I don’t think so. Does it matter for Microsoft or any of the other tech companies?

I have been a customer of companies that were awesome for years then sold out and their prices sky rocketed. They were clearly bleeding customers but every time they did they just put the price up more. Some people always stay for some reason. This can go on for years. As long as they keep screwing people faster than people leave they are probably making a lot more money in the short term than they would have made with a longer vision. That is business these days. People aren’t building products for the long term anymore. Now that thinking seems to have moved to companies. Modern business leaders are about gobbling revenues up like a locust plague then moving on to the next pasture.

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That’s where the puritans came from.

As an Australian who has lived with compulsory helmets for decades I think wearing a helmet and high vis is probably bare minimum if you have to share with cars and not nearly enough if you have to use door lanes and deal with Ford Rangers and garbage trucks.

Unfortunately once you go down this route cycling partipation drops and its a net fail for public health.

Sedate cycling on seperated pathways and through parks gets lumped in with high risk road cycling. It ends up being completely inappropriate for the type of cycling most people would like to do (not high risk vehicular cycling).

Why bother building expensive dedicated safe infrastructure when people have a magical inch of styrofoam on their noggins and a yellow shirt to protect them from 2 tonnes of murder machine.

It was (and is) spot on but Microsoft won the war for minds and lots of people in the Linux community started using Microsoft products like vscode and calling them good guys because they were running Linux datacenters and making kernel contributions. Microsoft employed some really good people working on some cool things. You were called out for being immature and holding outdated grudges if you used slang terms and you couldn’t participate in conversations and be taken seriously.

Meanwhile Microsoft was still being Microsoft. They bought the defacto town square - github - in an attempt to control the platform. Then they mined the content to train LLMs. Now the LLMs bombard open source projects with crap. Even as Windows is dying they are trying to drag us down as well.

They are a big company and big companies sometimes do good things. No hate on their engineers. But Microsoft have always been the enemy and they will always be the enemy. It is their nature.