In theory, it’s just an algorithm that will always produce the same output given the exact same inputs. In practice it’s nearly impossible to have fully deterministic outputs because of the limited precision and repeatability we get with floating point numbers on GPUs.

I’ll admit I don’t spend enough time on here to have a well-formed opinion, but aside from the occasional obvious spam post, I don’t see a lot of obvious bot activity… Depending on the instance/community, you’re going to get a lot of very strong and, uh… controversial opinions.

Keep in mind that the (still relatively) niche nature of Lemmy/Piefed (and the fediverse writ large) means that a higher proportion of people around here are going to be far from the center of the political gradient… and the western world is very much experiencing a cultural/political paradigm shift which is driving people to the fringes.

I also think that a lot more people are using the platform than a year or two ago and that has knock-on effects on moderation that we still need to figure out how to deal with.

I make no claim against the lack of freedom on Apple devices, but “un-free” doesn’t mean “user-hostile”. We’re talking about the perceived quality of experience for the user, not anything else. Like, look, don’t get me wrong, I still hate Apple (and all the big tech corpos) out of principle- but they provide an objectively better user experience for the vast majority of people.

• Apple has been, while extremely restrictive, very consistent on what users are allowed to do with devices… Google has repeatedly shown that they can’t be trusted to actually commit to popular features or services that they put out.
• Apple has put forward several measures to increase [perception of] user privacy where Google has repeatedly shown that they have no interest in doing anything other than collecting as much of your data as possible and using it for their ad business.
• iOS/iPadOS accessibility features blow Android’s out of the water in terms of breadth and quality; where with Android you often have to rely on third-party apps that may or may not work consistently or break with an update.

I fully agree with that sentiment, for what it’s worth. Apple is authoritarian but at least they’re mostly transparent about it.

Fair, but I think that while Apple is generally more authoritarian with regard to developer experience, they’re less user-hostile overall and generally strike a good (at least compared to the current alternatives) balance between freedom, privacy, and usability for most people.

I think Google (and Silicon Vally writ large) is coming to terms with the fact that past a certain size userbase, authoritarianism is necessary to maintain control, consistency, and (very importantly) safety… where Apple has pretty much always embraced it; for better or worse.

I could easily turn this into a larger critique about society and governance, federated republics being necessary in the long-term versus corporate monoliths, and the “10x everything” culture being the root of the new tech-right, but I will digress, lol.

Are we seriously going to pretend that Google hasn’t been just as evil for years now? At least Apple is able to provide a halfway-decent UX…

I’d like to see similar testing done comparing models where the “misaligned” data is present during training, as opposed to fine-tuning. That would be a much harder thing to pull off, though.

i prefer to do mine in the czech republic, personally

Laziness doesn’t exist. Everyone has their own struggles and it’s pretty fucked up to judge someone because they don’t choose to put their limited energy toward overcoming the obstacles that you take you’ve taken for granted having the ability to overcome. We should be encouraging curiosity and exploration, not demonizing people who got left behind and are too scared to try new things.

Being able to upload to Google Play Music was such a great feature. Honestly though, maybe it’s best that they killed it when they did. That way it can live on in memory as the example of what a music streaming service should be like… instead of becoming an enshittified zombie like spotify is today.

Hertz is the worst rental company I’ve had to deal with. Enterprise is the only one I’ll use if I have a choice.

Human posting of AI-generated content is definitely a problem; but ultimately that’s a moderation problem that can be solved, which is quite different from AI-generated content being put forward by the platform itself. There wasn’t necessarily anything stopping people from doing the same thing pre-GPT, it’s just easier and more prevalent now.

This. I often see people shitting on AI as “fancy autocomplete” or joking about how they get basic things incorrect like this post but completely discount how incredibly fucking capable they are in every domain that actually matters. That’s what we should be worried about… what does it matter that it doesn’t “work the same” if it still accomplishes the vast majority of the same things? The fact that we can get something that even approximates logic and reasoning ability from a deterministic system is terrifying on implications alone.

I’ve always hated that. I feel like I’m seeing it less and less on newer vehicles, though, so maybe manufacturers are also realizing that it’s stupid as hell.

Or maybe it’s just not worth the cost to have two different but mostly identical versions of a very expensive and highly integrated modern taillight housing for different markets.

It wasn’t just the norm for websites, it was the norm for every single kind of established platform that offered “free” content; see TV, radio, and even our goddamn public roadways.

Apple did not create an ad platform for the iPhone when it was introduced. The iAd platform was introduced in 2010 with the iPhone 4 as “mobile ads done right” (well after Google’s acquisition of AdMob in 2009, and certainly after the iPhone launch in 2007). It was subsequently shut down in 2016.

Developers never needed to “hack” ways to put ads in mobile apps. Mobile ad platforms already existed at the time, and developers were happy to use them extensively once they realized that smartphones were becoming a truly mass-market product (just like TV advertising, imagine that).

“I blame RCA for television ads. If they hadn’t made the first mass-market television set, we wouldn’t have TV ads interrupting my morning cartoons!”

that’s how you sound rn

Well, it was the norm for websites, why would anyone expect it to not transfer over to every other conceivable platform like it has today? The fact that Apple made the first device that allowed people to put adware on a device in your pocket is pure happenstance, and I’m not even sure how true that is given the existence of Blackberry and early Windows Mobile devices.

That said, have you ever heard of WildTangent? Because they’ve been around for a loooong time, and were really attractive to poor and stupid kids like me that really started using the internet circa 2005 and wanted to play computer games.

Again, what are you basing that on? Many websites, games, etc. that had traditionally only been accessible on a desktop/laptop were already primarily using ads for monetization at that point (I should know, I was using a lot of them). Blaming Apple for simply making the first handheld devices capable of running similar software makes absolutely zero sense.

How so? I went from Android to iPhone and one of the biggest reasons I kept it was the lack of consumer-hostile intrusive bullshit that seems to be everywhere on Google and Samsung products.

That’s… not how cookies work. They’re only accessible by the website that set them, and unless Lemmy starts embedding reddit content into its pages, there’s zero way for Reddit to know that you’re here.