smoothbrain coldtakes

why would you take anything you see on the internet seriously?

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • There are easier ways to spy on your employees. This is not cost-effective.

    I use Zoom for work now and each call can be several gigabytes large, depending on resolution of shared materials and a few other factors. If you want to save that kind of stuff long term, you have to pay to keep it somewhere. If you multiply several gigabytes over a few dozen calls a day, you’re going to end up with terabytes of garbage you need to store. Zoom also informs you of when a recording is starting and active, offering for you to leave the call or otherwise implicitly agree to being recorded. You have to pay for all these things because there’s a significant amount of processing power involved. It’s not like it’s free to run facial recognition and speech recognition.

    When I did contract work for Apple support, the spying was way more efficient than just listening to my calls. My supervisor could literally always see my monitor through the chat program we had installed. There’s all kinds of remote software for things like this. If an admin wants to see you misuse your equipment, they have easier ways of finding out than sifting through calls to find wrongthink.





  • It’s also only valuable if people keep contributing to it. It’s highly likely the majority of current existing reddit data has been largely incorporated into many LLMs prior to the API access limiting. Google paying them 60 million dollars is a hilarious pittance to keep training their LLMs, given how much money AI services will likely generate off of the training data.

    I don’t actively use reddit anymore, but when I need an answer to something that isn’t programming-related, it’s usually the top source on any given web search. That kind of content is basically the only stuff I would give a shit about. I can’t imagine how much absolute garbage you have to sift through on the platform to get reliable training data. Maybe the ratio is terrible and that’s why Google paid so little.





  • No, the game is still a scam because it’s been literally over a decade of development and every time I’ve been invited to go try the latest and greatest in their innovation, the game is laggy as balls and the servers never work. Also the fact that they have ships costing as much as actual automobiles that people purchase despite still being technically in beta is absolutely bonkers. They’ve had several waves of crowdfunding and the game is still in a pretty garbage state.

    Trust me, I’ve wanted an actual successor to Freelancer for longer than this game has been in development, and it still doesn’t scratch the itch because whenever I try to play it, the game essentially doesn’t work.

    Cost discipline is the last thing on these guys’ radar. A 20,000 dollar ship? That’s like a third of somebody’s annual salary.




  • I’ve had several Keychrons and the only one that failed on me was due to liquid damage. I’ve had three of them and the original one I purchased for working on a Mac is still running strong with a few coffee stains. The second one I bought with a backlight lasted two years and died by my own hand. I have a new backlit one with a different set of keycaps and it’s been going strong for a year with no issues.

    I tend to buy the wired C2 series which is the cheapest lineup. The great thing about Keychrons is that they are highly repairable and customizable by the user. You can replace keycaps, switches, and the keyboards are all designed to support both layouts with each requisite key included for Command and Windows. It can toggle to either OS via the flip of a switch, and you can attach the keycaps you prefer.

    I use the Windows layout on all of my machines that run Linux, personally. You could easily keep the Windows configuration switch and just uh, replace the key I guess if that’s your aesthetic preference. I would probably do that if I were in your position. The keycaps are included and it’s not going to interfere unless you flip the switch.