Data is nice but having no federal institutions able to do anything about all the illegal shit your companies is probably even nicer

Okay, fair, it’s not the ONLY reason they claim it’s dangerous. Obviously marketing is a large part of it. But they sure as hell would both like a duopoly setup enforced by LAW for themselves. Well at this point, I guess quadropoly? I doubt Google or Musk would give up their seats at the table. But anyone making an AI better or cheaper than the established players, would be deemed dangerous. Those working with the DoD would of course not be considered dangerous. Foreign models? Absolutely dangerous, restrict access as much as possible, especially to open weight ones.

There are rules and regulations set into place in the EU that the prices including VAT should be the same for consumers. Which means that there shouldn’t be a difference in price even though there is a difference in VAT rate

Hetzner definitely shows different price when you change VAT rate. So does Netcup. OVH just shows price without VAT. How would you keep the price same regardless of VAT rate anyway? Then you’d instead have to charge businesses of different countries a different amount essentially, meaning you’re the one discriminating by country. No, you have one price and then different countries add VAT differently to it. Do you have a link to those rules and regulations?

There are, though, cases where it’s OK to just charge your local VAT rate for everyone, rather than the customer’s local VAT rate. I only sell within my own country anyway so I’m not up to date on that - I believe it’s physical goods rather than digital services?

It is also not the end consumers problem that the VAT rate is higher

It sorta is, we’re the only ones paying it in reality?

Between B2B and B2C sales I’d get the same amount of money for the same invoice and have to pay VAT on it either way, which the customer pays to me, but the B2B customer gets a VAT refund and the B2C customer does not. Similarly, on any B2B purchases I make, I get a VAT refund myself. Nobody refunds VAT to me if I buy things as an end consumer.

Ex coworker of some friends of mine had an autogenerated email that almost read “go fuck yourself” in our language once you added the domain. Like close enough that anyone would see it. Not at work though. University. Unfortunately said university changed their domain.

And yet people are in denial about it being a hoax.

It’s always “oh Grindr went down in the city where the RNC held an event”. Why do people think Grindr has servers for each city and not a proper load balancing setup agnostic of the users locations?

Much more likely that cell towers get overwhelmed in that area. Or that they pull Grindr down in general. But the claim that always gets made is that they bring it down in the exact city where the convention happens lol

Some ~8-9 years ago when I first used Tinder, that was already quite gamified, much worse than what you describe. They had a subscription for infinite swiping and no ads, clearly aimed at men because there are fewer women and they find matches more easily.

A year ago, it was much, much worse already. You’d see as many bots as real women, and that’s in a small country - go to NYC and bots probably outweigh real women tenfold. Fewer and fewer swipes. You don’t get shown to women outside of your “elo” range (which isn’t a number you actually see, but everyone has an assigned “value” it seems), even though they get shown to you - no real point in swiping much of the time.

I hope people find a way to connect in real life.

If you have access to third places where people are open to meeting new people, that’s indeed the best way. I’m lucky enough not to live in a super car-centric city in the US or anything like that. Some people don’t have that going for them :/

20 years ago internet was a whole different place anyway. You’d set up a useful website as a hobby, it’d be monetized with either ads or a subscription if it was truly game changing, but it wouldn’t be invasive, if it makes you a living that’s great, if it doesn’t then you still have a day job. They were hobby projects. Now all the easy niches are filled already, you need to put a lot more effort into building something that people would want to use. That costs money. You start off by amassing costs, meaning you either sink a ton of your own money or investor funds into it. Now you truly do have to ‘acquire users at any cost’ and then monetize the shit out of them.

Yes, it’s famously the boomers who are getting together on Tinder and having a bunch of kids in 2026 /s

Hi, I’m from the EU, I have the right to get all of my data removed from a centralized service using GDPR. How do I do it on a decentralized one?

Leaving aside the whole issue of those companies not being trustworthy about the data deletion, at least my profile won’t be public when its’ been deleted and I’ve got someone to make a complaint about if I have reason to think they’ve lied about it. The fines can be pretty high. With federation, actually getting all copies of your profile deleted is nearly impossible. With torrent style decentralization, it seems completely impossible. Everyone will have access to everyone else’s data and it’ll be trivial to make backups.

Presumably most people would be using this on their phones with mostly their mobile data. An issue with the bittorrent protocol is that to open a connection, one peer has to have a port forwarded. Is this different with webtorrent?

Federation is simpler than true P2P here, but you then still need to trust the instance admins. It’s fine for Lemmy/piefed style media for me because I don’t put my real name, face and other details here.

My personal opinion is that a centralized alternative owned by a foundation rather than a for-profit company would be best of both worlds: No profit motive, just like decentralized. A centralized entity that holds liability in case there’s a data leak or someone starts spreading CSAM. And ability for said centralized entity to moderate said CSAM, scams and other reports.

I suspect you’ll have one big pain point to address that most apps other than the few big ones struggle with: The network effect. How do you get enough people on your app that it’s worth it for people to get on your app?

Suspect you need either a really visible feature you can advertise (“we’re not enshittified” alone isn’t necessarily enough to sway people), or a ton of advertising budget.

I toyed with the idea of building an app myself, wanted to build something similar to what OKCupid used to be, where you could optionally answer questions about yourself and calculate compatibility based on those. Building an actually good algorithm to find you people you’d most likely truly like seemed interesting. Then I realized I don’t have the time to see it through as a project to the point I’d get a truly active userbase and I’d have to run it at a loss for at least a few years so I can’t quit my other work. Hope you do better, match.com truly needs some competition.

They’ve gotten worse by the year. If you’re married and have 2 kids, you probably were on them long enough ago that it was quite different. You might also be conventionally attractive.

I’ve been single a couple of times in my life and some of those times I created a Tinder (and/or Bumble, OKCupid) account.

First time must’ve been about 8-9 years ago now after I got broken up with. Got an okay amount of matches, tons of interesting conversations. Met a few people IRL. Found a girlfriend after about half a year, ended up not being very compatible, broke up, made another Tinder account. 3-4 years on Tinder, getting fewer matches by the year. Increasingly few interesting conversations, met maybe 4-5 people IRL over that time (some of whom I’m still friends with). Ended up meeting the person who would become my baby mama and ex-wife. After I divorced her, created a new Tinder account and… near-zero matches. I saw TONS of bots. Like super obvious bots, all the same-ish profile archetypes (my favourite one being random letters for name with a weird blurry photo of a red building, saw hundreds of those). Half a year and two dates with one woman later, I just… deleted it and embraced being single. An average looking woman makes an account and in a few hours they have 99+ likes (where it stops showing the exact amount). Not quite happening for me or any men I know.

I’m not super attractive, kinda average looking face and a bit overweight, but I’m quite strongly built and masculine which some women seem to find, I dare say, irresistible, but many do not. But I’ve never (in my adult life - middle school was different) had problems holding a conversation with a woman, I’ve always had creative bios and decent photos compared to many I’ve been shown from other guys’ profiles. My ability to get matches on Tinder, Bumble, whatever, has gone down over the years, whereas I feel off those apps I’m better than ever? I’ve joked that I have the exact same thing with jobs and women: Once I get to the interview, I’m in, but getting there rarely happens.

And like… it’s not just the quantity of matches that went down. Quality too. By match quality I don’t mean “I matched shit people”, that would be quite arrogant of me to say. I mean I used to match more people with whom I felt I had things in general. People with whom a conversation would just flow until 5 AM. That just stopped happening over time.

Oh and you get fewer swipes than ever, no longer get any free superlikes on a free plan (you get 5 a week on gold I think, used to get few on free…), etc. The gold plan is like 20€ a month which I got as a bonus through my Revolut plan and… they still keep upselling you on both a more expensive sub, and consumable boosts.

Most other apps belong to the same company and seem to have degraded similarly - but none of them are used much here anyway, there’s 100x fewer people on Bumble and OKCupid would just show me people from other countries only.

TL;DR: Used to get more matches. Used to match people who I’d actually enjoy talking to (and vice versa). App itself is trying to upsell you more and more while you get about as much on paid plans now as you did on free plans back in the day.

Incidentally that’s why I don’t let it go crazy on anything without tests. Shit, it could rerun the test 10 times if it needs to, I don’t really care what the intermediate steps are, just that the end result is correct and it isn’t polluting my codebase with 7 line comments and docstrings for helper methods that are simpler than left-pad. If it then successfully fixes a difficult-to-find (but often easy to fix) bug that stems from changes to a large upstream codebase 9 times out of 10, then as far as I’m concerned, the accuracy of the tool I’m using is 90%. Don’t much care if the underlying model’s accuracy is technically only 50% or maybe even less. Still haven’t found a definitive solution for the claudespeak comments. They’re annoying and no matter how and how many times I tell it to stop adding them, it will fucking not.

Which is ALSO why I think asking a chatbot for advice on anything you’re not knowledgeable about yourself is a horrible idea. The accuracy is OK if it can iterate against validation.

Some of might expect it to measure 50.8mm x 101.6mm. But I suppose that’s unreasonable

Yeah most people click through warnings like that lol

Telegram secret chats are too, but regular ones are not and you can’t have a secret group chat.

Nobody who understands the topic thinks this.

Yes, and articles like this are important so people who DON’T understand don’t think this.

You don’t think the tens of millions of people who use signal all understand that just because everyone says it’s super secure, doesn’t mean they can’t be hacked or phished, right?

Estonians found a way to communicate without sex, future, articles or prepositions. Oh, sounds like a super easy language to learn with fewer things in it, right? Fuck you, we have 14 cases so we could tell foreigners from native speakers by how they confuse genitive and partitive, two of the most basic cases. And then most cities, towns, villages you’d go to use illative (“into”) to say “I’m going to X”, but some will be allative (“onto”) and there’s no rule for it, so people from other parts of the country might not know it and it’ll sound super weird.

And I still find English to be the weird language. Just look at the different words written as “lead”. Why are they pronounced so differently?! Nothing is pronounced as written.

Well the part of the article that quotes the actual job listing:

Part of that role, compensated at between $180,000 and $230,000, will be to “identify, assess, track, and investigate global threats including geopolitical instability, terrorism, crime, activism, nation-state targeting of the AI sector, and emerging security trends, including deep-dive research and OSINT collection on specific threats, actors, and events” (emphasis added).

But yeah, not a good look especially if you consider who decides what “terrorism” and “crime” mean in the US right now.

And now for a tangent I wrote that you can just skip if you’re not interested:

The part about specifically tracking AI activists was that they watch for anti-AI protests anywhere where their executives go so they know to stay out of the way, but… How do they not realize that they’ve brought this upon themselves? Market AI as “doing everyone’s job” and “super dangerous” and of course people will be pissed at you. Dario himself is the one constantly parroting how the next Claude model is so dangerous it needs to be kept in adamantium chains and whatnot. Like your industry is already pissing people off with the data centers and the cost of computer parts, why you gotta tell everyone you’re working to put us all out of jobs?

Jfc I’m a software engineer with no marketing or PR experience and I think even I could do better PR than all these companies supposedly worth billions. If OpenAI is already farming outrage, just position yourself as the more responsible alternative and you’ll still get sales without your execs needing to fear for your lives… Occasionally release a smaller, less capable version of Claude as open weight to win mindshare among developers, the people actually burning tons of tokens right now. Like Alibaba does with Qwen, just don’t release the full size model like Alibaba does if you’re afraid people are going to run it in competition with you.

The local ‘OF stardom’ is currently technically breaking the law. This would legalize what they’re doing and tax it as legal income. Worst case scenario, nobody registers their income, nothing happens. Best case scenario, a bunch of them will register their income because that means they can do their business 100% legally whereas before it was illegal anyway so why bother reporting it for taxes.

There’s very little, if any, potential downside for making porn legal if it’s already being produced and already available… like it is in most other countries. There’s some potential upside, even though it remains to be seen how much will actually be realized. It’s a nobrainer to do this IMO.

Most countries tax income regardless of source so moving abroad won’t make your OF account untaxed magically. And hiding your income is always a risk in most countries, unless you have a day job or something to explain your ability to pay for your expenses.

I have no idea how it is these days, but in the 90s there was a lot of trafficking going on in eastern Europe. Curtailing sex work in general might’ve been seen as a necessary evil to reduce that. Make your country as boring as possible to predators.

But yes, true on the conservative Orthodox folks too.