I think Kagi is kind of making this happen currently with search. Not sure how their adoption number are going, but people are willing to pay $$ for better search with no "sponsored content" rising to the top.
I'm hesitant about a lot of this stuff because it's very easy to get to a place where we let net neutrality degrade even more than it already has. Part of the way that platforms indoctrinate us to accept that paying extra for quality of service or "fast lanes" for specific content types are "necessary" is to degrade the existing experience so much that it seems inevitable.
Good catch. I didn't even think about the fast lanes fiasco. I don't know why businesses have decided that since they have connected to the internet that the internet owes them.
It should be a public utility. It should be as ad free as reasonable. It should not track you.
The internet should be a lot of things that it currently isn't all because rent-seeking money and power grubbing bastards have too many of the strings and love pulling them like they're pulling their puds.
Honestly even in "developed countries" it's not worth blindly trusting that the power in your house/building is clean. It's cheap and easy enough to just put any expensive hardware on a UPS rather than speculating what's going on behind the walls.
I work on embedded systems. I can often see whether my A/C or other appliances are running on my oscilloscope signals. They often affect the output of USB power supplies.
Eh, if these surges are rare enough, then you are statistical better off just risking your 'expensive' hardware to a one in a trillion possibility rather than spending money on gear you don't need.
Do you live in a bunker to protect against artillery shells?
I think it's important because there are a bunch of would-be claimants for intellectual property violation. Many people speculate that their work was used in training data, but it can be difficult to produce sufficient proof that their copyrighted work is present in the training data. If you could reliably get an LLM to produce 70% of a copyrighted book that would probably be enough to get a few lawyers salivating.
I didn't read the source paper referenced in the ars technica piece, but this statement about it makes me wonder how useful it actually is:
> But a study published last month showed that researchers at Stanford and Yale Universities were able to strategically prompt LLMs from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and xAI to generate thousands of words from 13 books, including A Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, and The Hobbit.
It seems like well-known books with tons of summary, adaptations into film scripts, and tons of writing about the book in the overall corpus make it way less surprising to see be partially reproducible.
So I guess that's a lot of words to say - yeah until there's something definitive that allows people to prompt LLMs into either unlawfully recreating an entire work verbatim or otherwise indisputably proving that a copyrighted work was used in training data, there's probably nothing game changing in it.
It's well-known books, yes, and even then with significant errors which means presumably lawyers for the AI companies would argue there is no possible damage. That said, US copright law has statutory damages for registered works that are not based on real, documented damages. I could totally see it being fought over, but I also agree it's probably not going to end up being game changing.
I suspect very works will be memorised enough to be an issue, and we'll see the providers tighten up their guardrails a bit for works that are well known enough to actually be a potential issue (issue in the form of lawsuits, not in the form of real damages to the copyright holders)
Clearly discord has more of a vested interest in boosting engagement - especially now that they are showing people "quests". What a quirky and fun way to say "ads"!
But at the same time I don't necessarily buy the idea that all of their reactions/roles/badges/etc are exclusively malevolent engagement-driven design decisions meant to hook people. I do think that some of them are legitimate improvements to chat communication, and as a result many of those features have proliferated across other messaging platforms. Hell, most of them didn't even originate at discord at all but were cribbed from their competitors.
To be clear, I 1000% agree with you that IRC is less addicting. Even just by simple merit of not having multi-device push notifications. Those pull me back into the app. But push notifications across devices are also just objectively useful. I name that one in particular because it's one of the biggest and most notable features that prevents me from returning to IRC, where I happily did most of my chat until the mid 2010s. I'm actively shopping for a discord alternative as a regular user who is fed up with discord's march toward enshittification, and matrix looks like it gives me most of that convenience without the worst parts of discord.
1000% agree - you said everything better that I was trying to say in my comment. Likewise coming from conventional TWMs I had some of the same struggles initially but the whole thing is just so smooth and config is so stupidly easy to work with. The docs are amazing and the community seems pretty boring in a good way :)
The majority of the projects in this comment chain don't actually independently implement a compositor in Rust - which is a good thing IMHO. Cosmic and Pinaccle at least come from a common core written in rust that is associated with the cosmic project: https://github.com/Smithay/smithay/
Currently using Niri and DMS via https://github.com/zirconium-dev/zirconium which is fedora bootc atomic + niri + dms. After taking a year or so away from tiling WMs where I was using KDE for a bit, I'm enjoying it quite a lot.
Super impressed by the "out of the box" experience given that it took a ton of sweat and tears to get these types of setups 10+ years ago when I posting stupid screenshots of my awesomewm and bspwm configs to /r/unixporn.
I wasn't so sure about the scrolling wm thing but I'm enjoying not having to worry about switching layouts constantly to "make room" like I always have in traditional tiling wms. Dynamic virtual desktops has taken some getting used to since I was a long-term adherent of the "10 static virtual desktops" way of thinking, but again it's been a good experience to just get used to the idea that each virtual desktop isn't as limited as it is in other WMs since you can have some content off screen.
I think an underrated aspect of Niri is that it's a cousin to System76's cosmic desktop: they share a base compositor through https://github.com/Smithay/smithay/. I think a big part of why Niri has been able to pull off such a polished experience has a lot to do with smart design from folks working on Smithay.
I hate LLMs as much as the next guy, but this was honestly just not very funny. Humor can be a great vehicle for criticism when it's done right, but this feels like clickbait-level lazy writing. I wouldn't criticize it anywhere else, but I have enjoyed reading a bunch of actually good writing from mcsweeney's over the years in the actual literary journal and on their website.
It's that brand of humor that isn't really humor anymore because the person writing it is clearly positively seething behind the keyboard and considers the whole affair to be deadly serious.
I've never really been able to get into it either because it's sort of a paradox. If I agree, I feel bad enough about the actual issue that I'm not really in the mood to laugh, and if I disagree then I obviously won't like the joke anyways.
For me I guess I don't really see what it's adding. You can watch an actual video clip of Jensen begging people not to "bully" or say "hurtful" things about AI while wearing a stupid leather jacket. It's a million times funnier to watch him squirm in real life.
I find it unfunny for the same reason I don't find modern SNL intro bits about Trump funny. The source material is already insane to the point that it makes surface-level satire like this feel pointless.
Like it or not, we're in an attention economy. We've seen that if we aren't loud and brash about it that the adminsitration will happily be loud (and sometimes lie) to push their narrative.
Maybe if we ever return to normal times and also don't let the other 90% of corruption stay where it's been for the past 40 years we can start to ease off the noise.
Are you sure you've actually used the higher refresh rate? It might not be enabled by default. I'd be surprised if you can't tell the difference comparing 60hz to 120hz back to back.
I'm hesitant about a lot of this stuff because it's very easy to get to a place where we let net neutrality degrade even more than it already has. Part of the way that platforms indoctrinate us to accept that paying extra for quality of service or "fast lanes" for specific content types are "necessary" is to degrade the existing experience so much that it seems inevitable.