azertyfun

joined 1 year ago
[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The studios! Think of the studios! Their execs couldn't live off merch sales and shitty reboots anymore! They might even have to - gasp - develop original IP if they want to milk an exclusive license. Some other execs would make money off some of last century's licenses! The horror! The tragedy!

That can't be. Clearly the best thing about Indiana Jones and Jurrasic Park is the death grip the studios have on those IPs. Ever since Steamboat Willie fell into the public domain I've been unable to enjoy the Disney Classics. All joy has been snuffed out from my life.

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 12 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Bro I wouldn't trust most companies not to store their only copy of super_duper_important_financial_data_2024.xlsx on an old AliExpress thumb drive attached to the CFO's laptop in a coffee shop while he's taking a shit.

If your company has an actual DRP for if your datacenter catches fire or your cloud provider disappears, you are already doing better than 98 % of your competitors, and these aren't far-fetched disaster scenarios. Maintaining an entire separate pen-and-paper shadow process, training people for it? That's orders of magnitude more expensive than the simplest of DRPs most companies already don't have.

Friendly wave to all the companies currently paying millions a year extra to Broadcom/VMWare because their tools and processes are too rigid to use with literally any other hypervisor when realistically all their needs could be covered by the free tier of ProxMox and/or OpenStack.

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

The lack of even the most basic understanding of parliamentary politics flying around in this thread is appalling, but certainly illustrates the reason why there are so many wild takes flying around on Lemmy.

To summarize:

  • The right got a 2/3rds majority in parliament. The united left had the most votes of any individual group, but that's only around 1/3 total.
  • The reason the left proclaimed they "won" is they came "first" and thought the center-right party would ally with them rather than the "hard right" (welp)
  • That, in isolation (!), isn't antidemoratic. A majority of French representatives (presumably) approve of the government. Simple maths. A government can only govern with the approval of parliament, it literally can't work otherwise.
  • However the French voting system very strongly relies on strategic voting, and the far-right came very close to having a parliamentary majority. Therefore the center-right party only got the seats they did because everybody left of the far-right made electoral agreements to pull out their candidates so only the candidate with the most chances to win against the far right would be running. This heavily benefited the center-right party who then allied with the hard right, which is being perceived as treason (for lots of reasons that I'm not going to get into). Strategic voting is a democratic failures and leads to suboptimal choices for representatives (thought that is still miles better than whatever the fuck the CCP is doing, since apparently that needs saying on here). Furthermore this whole shift to the right certainly isn't going to help with the socio-economic issues and is going to end up benefiting the far-right.
[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 0 points 2 weeks ago

Congrats. So you think that since you can do it (as a clearly very tech-literate person) the government shouldn't do anything? Do you think it's because they all researched the issues with these companies and decided to actively support them, or is it because their apathy should be considered an encouragement to continue?

You are so haughty you've circled back around to being libertarian. This is genuinely a terrible but unfortunately common take that is honestly entirely indistinguishable from the kind of shit you'd hear coming from a FAANG lobby group.

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works -2 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Why would you think only valid military targets were next to these?

That's... not a war crime is. I don't want to be the guy who justifies the death of civilians, because each one is a tragedy, but unfortunately in war there is such a thing as greater evils.

Why are you still believing the IDFs first reports when the vast majority of the time they’re lying?

Now that's fair. And of course we can as well point out that their whole war is self-inflicted to start with so there's not much legitimacy to any of their acts of war, even the less illegal ones.

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works -5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (4 children)

I'm as critical of Israel as any reasonable person but that's like the one thing they did recently that was actually a (at least somewhat) targeted attack against their enemies.

Calling that a war crime unnecessarily and dangerously dilutes the term. Leveling cities and starving the fleeing population is a war crime and a crime against humanity. Intentionally shooting civilians, children, aid workers, and journalists is a war crime. How about we focus on those, it's not like there's a shortage of israeli war crimes to report on.

EDIT: Apparently Lebanon reports 2800 injured and 12 dead from these attacks... How many fucking explosive pagers were involved? I doubt a significant percentage of those were Hezbollah, which would make that a war crime. The callous inefficiency of IDF operations will never cease to amaze me.

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 0 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Then you're knowingly engaging in the consumption of abusive products? Do you not see how you have literally no leverage whatsoever as a consumer?

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 0 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

Do you not consume a single Google/Meta/Microsoft product or do you not care about their abhorrent business practices?

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 0 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

You are conflating Consumers with Citizens, a classic pitfall of modern neoliberal democracies.

Just because people willingly Consume a Product does not mean they think The Product is good or even that it should exist at all. Neoliberalism is unable to acknowledge that, because Everything is a Market and the Market is Infallible.

In reality, the game theory is such that individuals may not have the means to get out of the local minimum they found themselves stuck in. Prisoner's dilemma and all that. That's what representative democracy is supposed to solve, when it isn't captured by ideology and corporate interests.

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

France's historic language policy is certainly highly problematic yes. Although the point is not genocide but class warfare and/or colonialism, not that it's much of an improvement.

And now do Belgium. French is the language of the elites (the monarchy and, historically, the aristocracy and bourgeoisie) but also a minority regional language. Is Flanders banning French on public signage a form of oppression? I personally think it's stupid Flemish nationalism but I wouldn't call it oppression.

So how about we stop making blanket statements. Moscow's erasure of Belarusian identity is at least oppressive and imperialistic and follows a long history of oppression. IDK if that qualifies as genocide (IMHO that undermines the gravity of something like the Holodomor), but something not strictly being genocide doesn't make it unimportant.

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I wonder how many terrorist (and "terrorist") plots that were foiled were from compromised telegram messages. How many Ukrainian airstrikes were called from similar sources. My gut says a whole lot more than people think. Since nothing is encrypted, one backdoor is all the NSA needs to read everyone's group messages. Like the much lamer version of Crypto AG, because in this case it's an open secret.

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 month ago

Socialists have been the go-to vote of the proletariat in Europe since the early 1900s, and most of these parties were in power at some point or another since 2000.

However these parties have fallen off a cliff in popularity, and the reason why will depend heavily on who you ask but it boils down to "workers don't feel represented by socialists".

  • The socio-economic landscape moved on since 1917, but the left-end of socialists did not. Orthodox Marxism says tertiary sector workers are basically part of the bourgeoisie (I've had Extremely Online Marxists explain that one to me with a straight face, so as an IT worker I'm afraid to say I am not allowed to partake in any True Socialism because I do not sell my Labor).
  • Conversely the "center-left" socialists are hardcore neoliberals (who just happen to think that some social programs serve the neoliberal agenda) and their policies have therefore failed to meaningfully curb the degradation of public services and standards of living.
  • The Left™ got stuck in the trap of being pigeonholed as "pro-immigration" during what most people felt like was immigration crisis. Doesn't matter how you feel about it, this culture war bullshit has profoundly hurt their polling scores and benefited bigots.
  • Parties with an internally democratic governance have been dreadfully slow to react to changes in the political landscape in the past 25 years. Retirees are voting in the primaries whereas extremist parties are led by autocrats who fully understand how to capitalize on online media attention (hence the better polling numbers of the far-right with thr youth).

Fighting fascists with "but socialists good for proletariat" is worse-than-useless. Voters know what socialists stand for, and that's kind of the problem because they feel it hasn't helped. People don't have hope in traditional European socialist policies, and only vote red out of tradition or as a barrage vote against the far-right.

 

Hi!

Kagi had a rough couple months on the PR side, and a comment from another Lemmy user arguing that they aren't using Google's index set me off... because I had just read a couple weeks ago on their own websites that they primarily use Google's search index.

Lo and behold, that user was "right": No mention of Google whatsoever on Kagi's Search Sources page. If that's all you had to go off of, you'd be excused for thinking they are only using their internal index to power their web search since that's what they now strongly imply. The only "reference" to external indexes is this nebulous sentence:

Our search results also include anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide, specialized search engines like Marginalia, and sources of vertical information [...]

... Unless one goes to check that pesky Wayback Machine. Here is the same page from March 2024, which I will copy/paste here for posterity:

Search Sources

You can think of Kagi as a "search client," working like an email client that connects to various indexes and sources, including ours, to find relevant results and package them into a superior, secure, and privacy-respecting search experience, all happening automatically and in a split-second for you.

External

Our data includes anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Yandex, Mojeek and Brave, specialized search engines like Marginalia, and sources of vertical information like Wolfram Alpha, Apple, Wikipedia, Open Meteo, Yelp, TripAdvisor and other APIs. Typically every search query on Kagi will call a number of different sources at the same time, all with the purpose of bringing the best possible search results to the user.

For example, when you search for images in Kagi, we use 7 different sources of information (including non-typical sources such as Flickr and Wikipedia Commons), trying to surface the very best image results for your query. The same is also the case for Kagi's Video/News/Podcasts results.

Internal

But most importantly, we are known for our unique results, coming from our web index (internal name - Teclis) and news index (internal name - TinyGem). Kagi's indexes provide unique results that help you discover non-commercial websites and "small web" discussions surrounding a particular topic. Kagi's Teclis and TinyGem indexes are both available as an API.

We do not stop there and we are always trying new things to surface relevant, high-quality results. For example, we recently launched the Kagi Small Web initiative which platforms content from personal blogs and discussions around the web. Discovering high quality content written without the motive of financial gain, gives Kagi's search results a unique flavor and makes it feel more humane to use.


Of course, running an index is crazy expensive. By their own admission, Teclis is narrowly focused on "non-commercial websites and 'small web' discussions". Mojeek indexes nowhere near enough things to meaningfully compete with Google, and Yandex specializes in the Russosphere. Bing (Google's only meaningful direct indexing competitor) is not named so I assume they don't use it. So it's not a leap to say that Google powers most of English-speaking web searches, just like Bing powers almost all search alternatives such as DDG.

I don't personally mind that they use Google as an index (it makes the most sense and it's still the highest-quality one out there IMO, and Kagi can't compete with Google's sheer capital on the indexing front). But I do mind a lot that they aren't being transparent about it anymore. This is very shady and misleading, which is a shame because Kagi otherwise provides a valuable and higher quality service than Google's free search does.

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