You just need to check the version history for mobile apps to see what the developers are doing! It’s a wealth of information on new features and changes.
For example here’s the Facebook app for iOS:
543.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (2w ago)
542.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (3w ago)
541.1 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (1mo ago)
541.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (1mo ago)
540.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (1mo ago)
539.1 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (1mo ago)
539.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (1mo ago)
538.1 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (1mo ago)
538.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (2mo ago)
537.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (2mo ago)
536.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (2mo ago)
535.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (2mo ago)
534.1 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (2mo ago)
534.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (2mo ago)
533.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (3mo ago)
532.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (3mo ago)
531.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (3mo ago)
530.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (3mo ago)
529.1 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (4mo ago)
529.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (4mo ago)
528.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (4mo ago)
527.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (4mo ago)
526.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (4mo ago)
525.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (4mo ago)
524.1 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (5mo ago)
If I’ve understood the grandparent post correctly, they don’t need the banner. They wouldn’t need it if the only cookie they set were a functional 1st-party cookie, and since that sole cookie is just to track cookie banner status, they especially don’t need it.
But taking the time to investigate that, get it approved by legal, etc. all takes longer than just slapping a cookie banner component on it.
This is why people complain about the unclear and bureaucratic nature of these laws, it leads to an over complicated investigation and compliance isn't always simple - meaning the safest option is to comply at the highest level and degrade the user experience.
Eh, it took me all of 2 days to strip all the unnecessary cookies out of our product, and convince management to leave out the giant unnecessary cookie banner.
The sites plastering those everywhere are doing a malicious compliance, pure and simple
I still suspect what happened was when the midwits all got access to ChatGPT etc and started participating in the A/B tests, they strongly selected for responses that agreed with them regardless of whether they were actually correct.
Some of us want to be told when and why we’re wrong, and somewhere along the way AI models were either intentionally or unintentionally guided away from doing it because it improved satisfaction or engagement metrics.
We already know from decades of studies that people prefer information that confirms their existing beliefs, so when you present 2 options with a “Which answer do you prefer?” selection, it’s not hard to see how the one that begins with “You’re absolutely right!” wins out.
Swap China for Russia/Iran and Venezuela for Syria/Yemen if you want an idea how that plays. Spoiler: not well for the proxies.
Without some sort of underlying religious ideology to neutralize being concerned about the likely outcome of hellfires dropped on you from 20k feet if you kill American soldiers, I can’t see many stepping up.
A "proxy" is someone who primarily serves someone elses interests first. Their own interests are subservient to that (if they come in at all).
Venezuelans who may end up fighting for Venezuelan freedom to rule themselves as a soveriegn free nation, with the right to fully benefit from THEIR own natural resources, are NOT proxies of anyone. Regardless of who helps them.
When you're a closet imperialist who thinks nothing of stealing other peoples land, resources, dignity & even lives, then everyone opposing you starts to look like a terrorist, an insurgent or a proxy.
“it’s easy peasy” says guy who demonstrably already knows and has time to learn a bunch of shit 99.9% of people don’t have the background or inclination to.
People like you talking about IPv6 have the same vibe as someone bewildered by the fact that 99.9% of people can’t explain even the most basic equation of differential or integral calculus. That bewilderment is ignorance.
"The shit about IPv4" was easy to learn and well documented and supported.
"The shit about IPv6" is a mess of approaches that even the biggest fanboys can't agree on and are even less available on equipment used by people in prod.
IPv6 has failed wide adoption in 30 decades, calling it "easy" is outright denying the reality and shows the utter dumb obliviousness of people trying to push it and failing to realize where the issues are.
Could you share a list of IPv6 issues that IPv4 does not exhibit? Something that becomes materially harder with IPv6? E.g., "IPv6 addresses are long and unwieldy, hard to write down or remember". What else?
Traffic shapping in v6 is harder than v4. At least it was for me, because NDP messages were going into the shaping queue, but then getting lost since the queue only had a 128 bit address field, and 128 bits isn't actually enough for local addresses. When the traffic shaping allowed traffic immediately, the NDP traffic would be sent, but if it needed to be queued, the adapter index would get lost (or something) and the packets disappeared. So I'd get little bursts of v6 until NDP entries timed out and small queues meant a long time before it would work again.
Not an issue in ipv4 because ARP isn't IPv4 so IP traffic shaping ignores it automatically.
Software support is a big one. I ran pfSense. It did not support changing IPv6 prefixes. It still barely does. So something as simple has having reliable IPv6 connectivity and firewall rules with pfSense was impossible just a few years ago for me.
Android doesn't support DHCPv6 so I can't tell it my preferred NTP server, and Android silently ignores your local DNS server if it is advertised with a IPv4 address and the Android device got a IPv6 address.
Without DHCPv6 then dynamic DNS is required for all servers. Even a 56 bit prefix is too much to remember, especially when it changes every week. So then you need to install and configure a dynamic DNS client on all servers in your network.
"I already know enough to be productive, can the rest of the world please freeze and stop changing?"
This is not even that unreasonable. Sadly, the number of IP devices in the world by now far exceeds the IPv4 address space, and other folks want to do something about that. They hope the world won't freeze but would sort of progress.
Network engineering is a profession requiring specific education. At a high level it’s not different from calculus. You learn certain things and then you learn how to apply them in the real life situations.
It’s not hard for people who get an appropriate education and put some effort into it. Your lack of education is not my ignorance.
I wonder if a good public flogging would compel chrome and web devs to have 80 tabs take up far less than a gigabyte of memory like they should in a world where optimization wasn’t wholesale abandoned under the assumption that hardware improvements would compensate for their laziness and incompetence.
The high memory usage is due to the optimization. Responsiveness, robustness and performance was improved by making each tab independent processes. And that's good. Nobody needs 80 tabs, that's what bookmarks are for.
There is no justification for that IMHO. The program text only needs to be in memory once. However, each process probably has its own instance of the JS engine, together with the website's heap data and the JIT-compiled code objects. That adds up.
I suspect there are either employees or contractors getting a cut because even getting a legitimate ad that doesn’t break any rules through review can be an exercise in frustration.
I once spent days getting rejection after rejection for ads for a Christmas light show event at a vineyard (not winery, it was a dry event), on the grounds that I was apparently selling alcohol.
Meanwhile I get ads for black market cigarettes, shrooms, roids, cannabis, and anything else you can imagine.
Yes please I totally agree. Something big must be going on there. I once bought an item through an Instagram ad. For about a month I got fake updates about shipping. Then one day I get an email that itvwas delivered 2 days ago, complete with a different shipping path and an apparently real USPS tracking ID. Of course I received nothing. Complained to PayPal, the complaint was closed within minutes as not valid.
What compelled you to buy something through an ad? Does it often work? My operating assumption is that every click-through internet ad other than major brands (Apple, car makers, etc) is basically a scam.
I've bought shirts I've seen through Facebook ads before. Ads can work, but Facebook is propped up with so many scams these days you have to wonder at what point do they get investigated over it? Amazon has had a similar problem, I've seen loads of threads here over it. I have been fortunate enough that most things I've bought off amazon have been legit.
I've gotten to the point where I consider anything advertised to me to be at least somewhere on the "scam spectrum". With the actual value/scamminess being indicated by a number of factors:
1. Frequency: The more I see ads for something, the more of a scam / less value I believe it to be.
2. Channel: Anything on YouTube or social media is 100% unequivocally a huge scam. To the point where if I think a product is legit or worthwhile, and I happen to see it on YouTube, I will change my mind and not even consider purchasing it.
3. Algorithmic vs. word of mouth: Anything I see that is obviously algorithmically fed to me (like recommendations, "you might like" and "featured" products) increases the scamminess / decreases the value.
It's too bad that legit small businesses trying to crack into a market are collateral damage, and I feel for them, but the ad pond is full of scum and if you're legit and you dive into it, you're going to get scum all over you.
I agree and I would similarly reconsider any purchase if I saw an ad for the product or company online. At this stage it's almost like if you have to advertise then you're not worth it.
How do we find what's worth buying then? Word of mouth, trying things in stores, reviews where they buy the products and are not given them.
I've blocked ads from my online experience for 20 years now, and I don't watch broadcast TV or radio, I live in a small town so I don't see much visual advertising. I feel like I'm at close to ad free as you can be in our ad saturated world. I don't feel that much is different between myself and our neighbours except that their house is full of shite they buy and throw out. None of it qol improving things. And we still have lots of material things, it's not like I spend no money. I guess my point is: what is the actual point of all this advertising anyway if you could remove it and not much changes. Make the world better, give us back our attention by default, we'll still buy stuff!
This has the same answer as when people ask "How do we find dating prospects without the internet?". Same way we did before the internet was a thing ;)
While I suppose I haven't technically seen a recent scam ad pretending to be a major brand, I have seen use of copyrighted art (Disney or anime characters), and Elon Musk's face, to imply they represented a major brand.
Yeah, don't do that. Instagram ads are no different to the WURGLBIXY and HUYTVING and XORMLINAP and other smashed up syllable "brands" on Amazon, except they'll mostly deliver something to you, even if it is shit.
Take any of the images from an Instagram ad. Someone, somewhere, did (probably) build or design the product being sold (a lot come from Kickstarter and may have never launched), but if you search you'll find hundreds or more scams riding on that coattails who will hope to collect and fuck off with your money before IG shuts them down (if they ever do).
I took an IEC power cable that came with a no-name broken printer my folks bought off Amazon. It was rated for the usual North American 120V/15A, but the conductors on the inside were hardly suitable. Measuring with cheap calipers, I reckoned they were good for about 1/10th of that. Similarly dangerous products with any of the generic electronics currently selling on Amazon/Temu/eBay/et al. Poor isolation, poor grounding, underrated wires, incorrect fuses, knock-off ICs, lord knows what kind of chemical treatments and/or lead content; It's as if regulations no longer exist, since there's no longer any fixed target that can be sued to enforce them. Something will need to be done directly to Amazon that will cause them to put a check on these products, but that seems laughably naive in the current political contexts.
Amazon has sold fraudulent fuses that will kill people for years and they don't care. Big Youtubers did videos to try to get Amazon to care. Amazon just does not care if people die because caring would impact their business model. They are straight evil at this point.
Yeah, Amazon literally could not give less of a fuck. Leave a review on the seller, deleted. Leave one on the product, deleted. They say it's because of co-mingling but sorry, that's your hole you dug yourself, Amazon.
And why did you remove the option on returns to say "I think this is counterfeit"? etc. etc.
Full willful head in the sand.
Anything electric/electronic like that, now, I only order from places like Adorama or B&H or the manufacturer. And then actual "higher" end ones like Anker, etc.
"We're just a marketplace". I really need to revisit leaving Amazon as a resolution.
Same on X. It’s possible that the scammers just operate networks of credit cards and domains and rotate as soon as they grt flagged. Numbers game basically. But it’s also possible that the rules are applied differently to advertisers that bring in a lot of cash, regardless of legality.
I don't think it was Jack's fault, but Twitter went from something that (granted they did tend to do a few shady things from a UX perspective) was fine and largely worked but did have a massive censorship problem, to something that works less well (seriously? i can't see posts chronologically without an account? on TWITTER???) and apparently still has censorship (although I was mostly preoccupied with covid, actual doctors getting banned for truthful information, pre-Musk)
Exactly. Blatant scam ads are reported to no avail, and I see them still multiple times a day.
After reading Careless People, it became much more tangible. "Yes people are motivated by money", but Zuck and others at the top of FB actively make a point of expending significant effort to avoid fixing things. It's not that they don't know, or care, it's that they know and care about keeping the gravy train at full speed while they pat themselves on the back for being masters of the universe, so to speak.
There’s a very negative immune response to the idea of Netflix running ads.
And yet they’re there, in the form of prominent product placement in all of their original series along with strategic placement in the frame to make sure they appear in cropped clips posted to social media and made into gifs.
Stranger Things alone has had 100-200 brands show up under the warm guise of nostalgia, with Coke alone putting up millions for all the less-than-subtle screen time their products get.
I’m certain AI providers will figure out how to slyly put the highest bidder into a certain proportion of output without necessarily acting out that scene in Wayne’s World.
People said the same thing when Steam launched, yet my profile sits there with a badge saying 20+ years and I can’t recall a time I’ve encountered an issue that was the fault of Valve versus a developer or publisher.
At this point the games I “own” on physical media like CDs have theoretically started to degrade before the threat of Valve revoking my ability to install or play has come to pass.
I’ll be very surprised if during all the time he spends doing nothing and winning, he hasn’t planned ahead for his company not becoming the very thing he hates and sets it apart.
I’d put a controlling interest in a trust with ironclad instructions to have Valve do the opposite of Ubisoft/EA. That would buy it another half-century at least.
This is because of Gabe and Valve itself, and it's not a universal constant. I have quite a few licensed software where I have the license, but installing the software is impossible.
This is why I still keep a copy of the software I bought, and religiously backup that trove. Because someday that S3 bucket or SendOwl link or company server will go down.
Sometimes, a company will raise prices, so the publisher will have to kill the old links. C64Audio had to switch to BandCamp and invalidate SendOwl links because of that price hike.
I'm still bitter about not being able to reset my Test Drive Unlimited install count online just because I have updated my computer and transferred the whole Windows installation to the new system back in the day.
There are not many ways to battle the entropy of the universe.
AFAIK, even if the developer removes a game from Steam, if you bought it (or rather, a license for it), it remains in your account.
E.g. I have Lord of the Rings: War in the North that is no longer available anywhere, yet I can still download install and play it on my devices through Steam (even on Linux, which it was not intended for)
That of course doesn't help if the game does not have an offline component, e.g. I also still have League of Legends in my Steam account, but that is unusable because the Riot servers don't allow updating/connecting from it.
As a millenial all I see is my generation being repulsed by AI slop. Boomers and zoomers though have a large presence of consumption. It was easy to see this with your own family over the holidays.
They will tell you they are repulsed by it if asked but its a toss up if they can identify it. Look at any thread on Reddit/IG/Tiktok whatever and I personally would guess I could manage to identify AI output 20% of the time.
Boomers might be out there consuming those AI youtube videos that are just tiktok voice over with a generated slide show but Millennials think since they can identify this as slop that they are not affected. That is incorrect, and just as bad.
Nah, it's fueled by huge misinformation campaigns. It's going to kill art, put us all out of the job, uses 1.5 million gallons per query, pollutes water, will kill the electric grid, etc. These seem to be the most popular uninformed lines of thinking.
I agree several of the commonly repeated critiques are really poor in quality and can be emotionally driven/simply parroted TikTok nonsense, but at the other end of the spectrum we have AI evangelists who get surprisingly aggressive if you say anything remotely negative about GenAI or suggest maybe we should be having a discussion about the ethical ramifications of these tools. Particularly how they are trained and deployed and who should be guiding that process.
I find it very odd when people proudly proclaim they used, say, Grok to answer a question. Their identity is so tied up in it that if you start talking about the quality of the information they get incredibly defensive. In contrast: I have never felt protective of my Google search results, which is basically the same thing given how most people use these tools currently.
It’s kind of wild how hostile some people get if you attempt to open the discussion up at all.
I live near the Great Lakes. Data center proposals are popping up and people think they are going to drain lake michigan. They think they will consume more power than the entire state consumes right now. Idiot yokels are chasing away what could be an absolute boon for our economy. But they'd rather have papermills and make cardboard boxes.
I don’t know the specifics of your region’s deal but the massive AI center deal Louisiana negotiated with facebook is absolutely awful. All it’s going to do is drive up energy costs for the residents and give very little in return, and that’s under the ideal situation in which it actually pans out like they’re expecting it to.
Ya we seem to live in the the place where the firehose of falsehood is filling the lake of bullshit asymmetry. The problem with this is uninformed lines of thinking eventually lead to policy.
I'm not blaming them. It's really frustrating that old people are taken advantage of. We shouldn't need to be so cynical. This isn't the star trek future we were promised.
Edit: It's similarly frustrating about the zoomers. Parents are derelict of duty by not defending their kids and preparing them for the world they are in.
Sci-fi will never materialize. But the ones passionate about it are so desperate for the faux future that they won't be able to tell when they're being duped.
Just wait until the next great collapse, a disaster big enough to force change. Hopefully we'll have the right ideas lying around at the time to restructure our social communication system.
For example here’s the Facebook app for iOS: