Buttflapper
The difference is that flat Earth theory people were honestly very few and far between. There were not a whole lot of these people around, but now, it seems like at least a quarter of the population if not more Don't believe in climate change, because if you look at every election in the USA, it's damn close. That means about 40 to 48% of the population honestly believes the bullshit that the far-right conservatives are pushing on them. Just look at Florida if you need any example. Banning books like we are in the 1800s, now they took down information that has the words climate change off of the official state websites, which is extremely dangerous after a major storms have decimated entire towns and cities. And people still won't believe it
Micro center does that? Because I asked them about that and they said they will only do it for certain items. That's really strange honestly. I would also feel a little bit bad about it, because Amazon is clearly trying a loss leader strategy to mark down the product prices to ridiculous levels, I'm sure that would not help local small businesses if I can't afford it, so I wouldn't want to exploit that
Canon printers specifically are designed to take Canon specific photo paper. Even the drivers on your Windows PC are programmed to understand what those photo papers are, and you have to match up to them. If you use some generic paper, the prints will never come out right.
When chatting with the first came out, all the rage was about how you could punch anything into chat GPT, use it hideously for any purpose no matter how silly or inconsequential, but you could also use it for serious things as well. For example you could ask it a question and it would search the web or search its databases and provide you a detailed response about some topic. Now, chat GPT gives you almost nothing. I asked it three questions today, very simple questions. One of them was about inkjet printers, literally two sentences. Another question I asked was about a cooking recipe. Third question, it refused to answer and gave me this bogus response that I have run out of responses and that I should subscribe.....
Claude is apparently in the same boat right now. After I unsubscribed for Claude pro because of it being a true waste of money, I was able to get maybe one or two questions out of Claude a day, and most of the time I can't ask at any questions because they are at capacity supposedly
So it's kind of funny. AI is committing mass theft of copyrighted information and data on a widespread scale, the only way they are going to be able to train their AI models and have been training their AI models are through free information that has been taken from users, people of the world, sold to them by third parties. And now, you can no longer use AI for free! You have to pay for the information that they took from you for free, and likely copyright information that they shouldn't have had to begin with....
Welcome to episode 1 of Black mirror reality TV series!
I think you misunderstand. I have no issue with the platform, if the platform is a complete end-to-end replacement that consumers can use. But that's not the case. They want you to use the platform, and they're going to send you pounds of paper in the mail. I don't want both. It should be either or! If I sign up for my chart, put everything in there. Send me emails. Why are you going to make me sign up for my chart, and now you're going to send me a statement every single week or month? Wtf? I need both?
That unfortunately is the consequence of letting a company have a monopoly. The US govt should've opposed that, and should've forced them to sell it. They own such a huge share of the entire VR market right now it's unbelievable, and Pico by byte dance isn't legally able to be sold on the USA
VR is on the verge of collapse in the USA thanks to the US government banning byte dance. We can't even order the new Pico 4 ultra, which is one of the most anticipated VR sets in the world right now. Meta basically has a monopoly and just announced they're cutting funding to VR
Damn that's wild. Any business that has that drastic of spikes of profit and loss cannot possibly be sustainable. I can't see how it could be. Look at the automobile giants in the USA. All it took was one major economic event to bankrupt them, and they got bailed out which should've never happened. It's bullshit.
you don't see Apple and Samsung going out of business.
Samsung is damn near the point of going bankrupt. Samsung saw a 95% drop in profits for a second consecutive quarter 2023
Gameplay is still more important than game resolution
In your opinion*. You forgot that part. For lots of people, graphics are way more important because they want a beautiful and immersive experience. They are not wrong to want that. I respect that you feel the way you do, but I respect others who care more about graphics. I'll even go so far as to say that I am of the same mind as you, I don't care about the graphics much at all but there are some games where the graphics have truly wowed me, or the visual effects. For example two that come to mind, Ori and the will of the wisps, or No Man's sky. Two very different games but absolutely crazy visual effects and graphics on high-end computers. Another game that I play a lot is World of Warcraft, gameplay is so damn fun but it's hard to get any of my friends to play it because it's so ugly, looks like a poorly rendered PS3 game. That horrible quality of graphics prevents people from even trying it
Most gamers don't even have hardware that would allow that type of resolution.
This is because they refuse to innovate. Think of the DVD player. You think a DVD player costs a lot today? Of course not, there's a million of them and no one wants them anymore. If they actually innovated and created drastic leaps and technology, then older technology would be cheaper. It's not expensive to go out and get an RTX 2080, which is the graphics card I currently have. Is about 250 or $300 now, pretty damn solid card. If they actually innovated and kept pushing the limits, technology would accelerate faster. Instead they want the inverse of that. They want as slow growth in technology as feasibly possible, maximum amount of time to innovate, maximum amount of revenue, and maximized impact on the environment. All those carbon emissions and waste of graphics cards being thrown out
Shows that You are in the UK. Just want to clarify I'm talking specifically about the USA but I agree with everything you said. Tech stocks became so inflated! Don't know if people are seeing it in Europe, but here in the USA, there is this really toxic and very cringe behavior from these tech companies to get people back to office, they can force people to return to office across the country, basically you have to relocate and upend your entire life which could cost you $50,000 and they're not paying for that, if you don't do that you get fired. Easy way to start laying off people without having to pay them anything because you can call it insubordination, since they refuse to return to office. Now they supposedly have cause to get rid of people or deny them promotions for more money. IBM for example is doing this right now, Cisco was doing it as well. One of the most major networking software companies in the market. Scumbag behavior
I wouldn't say the movie industry is struggling, I would say that people that work for a living are struggling. Actors are still getting paid huge sums of money, so are directors and producers. They are getting their pound of flesh one way or another. They are just not producing anything that people want to watch. For example all this marvel post-infinity War bullshit, no one wants to see that. No one cares about marvel Disney anything right now, it's low quality drivel. But Beetlejuice, Barbie, oppenheimer... These are proof that people do still want to see movies, they just don't want to produce anything meaningful.
The people struggling that I'm talking about, however, are the supporting roles. People doing the filming, set dressing, makeup, special effects. Lots of these lower levels supporting roles get almost nothing compared to their cost of living in California, while some of the main actors can get tens of millions
I keep seeing this everywhere, and I had to go to Great lengths to remove co-pilot from my windows 11 on my current PC once I upgraded. Had to use a bloatware removal script to forcibly get that thing the hell off there. Now I'm seeing ads on Amazon and other places about PCs being bundled with copilot AI. I have tried using co-pilot myself, it is completely worthless. That thing is a hot piece of garbage, and somehow, works even worse than chat GPT. Like, that is truly impressive, because Chat GPT has degraded in quality over time and now they are in the news often for various controversies, the latest being a complaint about how they can't survive without stealing copyrighted content...
Who in their right mind is hoping to get a copilot powered PC???
I don't see how this is legal, but people on Tik Tok peddling miracle "medicine" are becoming more common every day. No FDA approval, no research. Just their marketing hype and false promises. This one, lady is showing some sort of probiotic and claiming it can help people suffering from severe acid reflux and gastrointestinal reflux disease or GERD, replacing medicine that has been tested for decades.
Local group on Facebook for finding houses and apartments, and hundreds upon hundreds of comments on every single post for the past couple months are completely AI generated scam spam links. They are probably using the API version of GPT4o, and break even off of scamming enough people.
I remember when you could go on Facebook and look through your feed at what your friends are saying, catch up with them, and browse posts that they have made. Now, it's just completely random and chaotic, almost nonsensical. There's no logical sense to my Facebook feed at all. As you can see in the image, they are showing me stuff that I'm not even following. This is not even something that I am actively a part of! It's some random group. So what's the point of following a group or liking a page, if they're just going to show you random stuff anyway?
Like, wtf happened to this website?
Social media platforms like Twitter and Reddit are increasingly infested with bots and fake accounts, leading to significant manipulation of public discourse. These bots don't just annoy users—they skew visibility through vote manipulation. Fake accounts and automated scripts systematically downvote posts opposing certain viewpoints, distorting the content that surfaces and amplifying specific agendas.
Before coming to Lemmy, I was systematically downvoted by bots on Reddit for completely normal comments that were relatively neutral and not controversial at all. Seemed to be no pattern in it... One time I commented that my favorite game was WoW, down voted -15 for no apparent reason.
For example, a bot on Twitter using an API call to GPT-4o ran out of funding and started posting their prompts and system information publicly.
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/chatgpt-bot-x-russian-campaign-meme/
Bots like these are probably in the tens or hundreds of thousands. They did a huge ban wave of bots on Reddit, and some major top level subreddits were quiet for days because of it. Unbelievable...
How do we even fix this issue or prevent it from affecting Lemmy??