Do I misunderstand emby or does it just not seem like a good deal on the basis of it being an ongoing subscription? I use the free version of emby and it’s really great. There was at least one feature that required payment to unlock. I like emby already and when I tried using jellyfin, the core features that were on both it and the free version of emby worked far less reliably and the paid feature on emby that was free on Jellyfin, worked extremely unreliably. Obviously resources and development had been spent to make something that worked very well and their paid feature probably would too. I use emby to make it easier to cast media locally to my chromecast and to access media on my computer, from my phone in my bedroom, so for me, it’s a fancy file browser and media player. The feature I wanted was to do with free to air tv streaming and I was thinking I’d be happy to pay for the Emby software to unlock this since they made good software that works. But here’s the thing, it’s FREE to air TV and yet they want me to pay, ongoing, in a perpetual arrangement to use it. I don’t get it. I use it to play media, but the media is my media stored on my machines. I understand software development isn’t free, I was happy to pay ONCE, but why would I keep paying when they don’t actually produce the media I use it to play? That seemed unjustifiable.

I’m more unhappy with messaging apps that notify people if you’ve read a message. It did have a positive side effect in that with Facebook, once they introduced that feature sometime around 09 or something, it caused me to reduce my use of the messaging capabilities significantly but frankly I’m not sure that’s really what Facebook or I really wanted. It’s a common feature in messaging applications and I fucking hate it. I need to read the message to decide if I want people to know if I’ve seen it and I can’t do that without telling them I’ve seen it.

In Australia Clive Palmer is famous for constantly sending out texts during his campaigns, people complain they got multiple per day. I wasn’t aware there was any law against it here, in fact I thought people had been saying it OUGHT to be illegal.

If everyone talks like this all the time and it influences how AI models produce text outputs, then those models are basically getting it right and would be indistinguishable from normal people since that’s how all people will speak.

I realise the dumbass here is the guy saying programmers are ‘cooked’, but there’s something kind of funny how the programmer talks about how people misunderstand the complexities of their job and how LLMs easily make mistakes because of an inability to understand the nuances of what he does everyday and understands deeply. They rightly point out how without their specialist oversight, AI agents would fail in ridiculous and spectacular ways, yet happily and vaguely adds as a throw away statement at the end “replacing other industries, sure.” with the exact same blitheness and lack of personal understanding with which ‘Ace’ proclaims all programmers cooked.

That’s got to be the key to all this, specificity, it’s great that it’s got natural language processing to simplify things but sometimes that’s what’s actually getting in the way. What they should really do is have a special version of chatGPT for programming where users can interact with it in a very special form of structured English. It’s still natural language, this is the future after all, none of that zeroes and ones crap like the stone age, but just highly specific words with carefully defined meanings particular to making repeatable and executable steps in a pattern that does the same thing every time in response to inputs to produce outputs. You could then “speak” to one of these LLM things using this carefully structured English to automate specific tasks. The real kicker would be that you could tell it to chain together a bunch of these tasks you’ve had it automate for you to build up in to something much more complex. This would really harness the power of AI because at each step it’s made it for you, with minimal input from yourself because you’re just ‘talking’ to it in a very specific way. Admittedly this approach would be a little bit less obvious for new users than a standard LLM, but if an average person kept doing this for like a year or two they’d get pretty adept at this manner of speech, it’d be kind of like learning another language and people have been doing that for as long as there’s been people, I speak in a language everyday, I’m doing it right now. We could make it easier too, we could have courses and schools to help people get better at it faster.

Haha, did you ever try it out? Maybe it really was your life long calling.

Will it actually kind of was ironically. I was going to try and make a go of it, but I was immensely worried I’d be caught in the act and having to maintain the channel flipping with the remote made things awkward too. When it suddenly tuned in consistently I thought I’d hit the jackpot but then I got so worried I’d leave evidence I flicked away from the channel again before I could really you know, get anything out of it.

Once I went on holiday in Europe as a young teen. The hotel room had a tv with like 2-3 free normal channels and extra channels including porn that you could access if you called the front desk and gave them credit card information. I definitely wasn’t going to do that since I didn’t have a credit card and this room was booked in my parents’ names, however the whole reason I knew about this was because I was flicking the through the normal channels simply because I was bored and I accidentally flipped past the porno channel. You weren’t supposed to be able to see anything on there because they want you to pay up for that so when you land on this channel you’re presented with some kind of teletext on black screen saying something like call reception to access with a phone number or something, however, when you first flick to this channel, it takes a little while to kind of tune in to it before it displays the teletext and as it tunes in it looks just like the image from this post before instantly clearing in to a complete picture and you get about 1 almost 2 seconds of whatever porn was showing at the time and then the paywall. So being pretty desperate, obviously I flicked up past the channel and back down again to get my 1-2 seconds of porn and did this repeatedly over and over again. Funnily enough, I would have been content with this uncomfortable viewing arrangement but after doing this in a rhythm for a while I noticed that sometimes you’d get 1 second or sometimes 2, or sometimes even like a full 5 seconds or more and this would happen in no particular order of successive channel flips when then suddenly it just flicked on to the channel permanently with no interruption. I have no idea why that happened but this image definitely reminds me of that. Funnily enough I didn’t really take advantage of this luck because I was so shocked by that suddenly happening and so worried it might get billed to the room anyway that I just flicked away from the channel and turned it off.

Yeh, arguably and to a limited extent, the problems he’s having now aren’t the result of the decision to use AI to make his product so much as the decision to tell people about that and people deliberately attempting to sabotage it. I’m careful to qualify that though because the self evident flaw in his plan even if it only surfaced in a rather extreme scenario, is that he lacks the domain specific knowledge to actually make his product work as soon as anything becomes more complicated than just collecting the money. Evidently there was more to this venture than just the building of the software, that was necessary to for it to be a viable service. Much like if you consider yourself the ideas man and paid a programmer to engineer the product for you and then fired them straight after without hiring anyone to maintain it or keep the infrastructure going or provide support for your clients and then claimed you ‘built’ the product, you’d be in a similar scenario not long after your first paying customer finds out the hard way that you don’t actually know anything about your own service that you willingly took money for. He’s discovering he can’t actually provide the service part of the Software as a Service he’s selling.

I don’t live in the states but there’s similar systems in some department stores here in Australia and I suspect, but don’t know, that applicable law in these cases is broadly similar. The store and their employees aren’t law enforcement and can’t arrest you or have any legal recourse for you ignoring their demands to stop and allow your receipt to be checked. They likely also have the right to refuse service to you and deny you entry to their premises and so long as this isn’t being done for a small number of specifically forbidden reasons (such as on the basis of race for example) they don’t need a legal justification to do so. This would mean that refusing to comply with their receipt checking policy might be enough if they see fit, to decide to deny you entry to their stores going forward. Many large department stores are incorporating facial recognition and don’t it seems feel the need for proper informed consent beyond some printed signage saying that but entering you’re consenting, so the practicality of them doing this is at least a little bit higher these days but I guess there’s no way to assess how likely this really is.

Even if they didn’t, you generally recharge in your house where hopefully not everyone can see your stuff.

ok, meet in the middle, shove a firecracker up his arse and attach some wings to him.

I didn’t know who that was before looking it up and I totally thought you were taking about the Pokemon lol

Look it was a long thread okay.

I haven’t been presented with any Ts and C’s. Do they apply if I already installed Firefox before this?

Well yes there’s always the seven seas I guess. They were always a refuge for me before YouTube as well.

Realistically we didn’t need it before YouTube existed and I should be fine without it, but I think it’ll be tough, I don’t have an aerial for FTA tv anymore, nor a tv in my bedroom and I don’t really want to sign up for a subscription streaming service. Plus a decent chunk of my employers use YouTube as end point for the videos I edit so that could be a bit of a hit too. There’s always reading I guess, that might be doubly necessary if I end up poorer and can’t afford much else.

Wasn’t that interested before but it does give it a certain allure now to be sure.

“Simplicity is key, a good cut of beef, salt, pepper and olive oil”. Ironically I suspect that, despite it being steak and being posted by a woman talking about cooking, such a post would still cop a lot of flack and trigger a lot of the type of people that would choose to use Truth Social because of the mention of seed oil over animal fat.