The plan to deprecate Chrome V2 extensions has been constantly postponed again and again for years now. There is NO SCHEDULED DATE for this to happen currently, and when it is announced it will be more than 6 months out.
If Google really wanted to kill ad blockers, they would have done this years ago.
They don’t. They want to force ad blockers and other similar extensions to use more efficient APIs that don’t slow down the web. Extension developers overall (not just ad blockers) aren’t happy with the changes, so they’re still working on the APIs.
I’m going to use Chrome as long as I can. If they update and break my Adblock extensions (and there isn’t a fix in a day or two from devs), I switch browsers or find some other workaround.
I’m glad people with more ability to avoid the problem are trying to do so proactively (via ad-on updates, alternative browsers, etc)… so I don’t need to worry about an ‘escape route’… because I know there will be one.
You are mostly right. Think about how many people use chrome on corporate office computers that they do not have permission to install anything on or modify. It’s part of the reason Windows is so dominant. Businesses run windows and chrome a shit ton. I work for a Fortune 100 company. It’s Windows and Chrome across the whole company.
I work for a large company and its the same. They even force-install Chrome despite Edge already being there! Yes, some people will make the privacy argument that Microsoft takes your data, but so will Google, and it’s not as if the business cared either way, because if they did they’d install an adblocker or Firefox, which they don’t.
Hate to say it, but I think you’re giving the average person way too much credit. Most people are just not that smart.
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of them are stupider than that.” - George Carlin
Average and below internet users are not the kind of people you meet on Lemmy. They are people like the aging Gen-Xer who doesn’t know the difference between “the internet” and a web browser, or the kid whose parents shoved a tablet in their face to get them to be quiet for an hour.
Most people want computers to be an appliance like a washing machine - the thought that they can shape their own experience on their phone or computer never even occurs to them.
I suspect they spend most of their time in apps and not surfing the internet. Just a guess really since I saw the mobile traffic exceeded desktop. A lot of people don’t spend hours on the “internet” surfing. Tic Tok sure. Hell I’m getting more and more like that. Even when I use chrome I still only go the the same sites for the most part. lol
Google’s doing a pretty shitty job on that front since uBlock is already prepared with a new version that will work largely the same after the changeover.
I don’t think it’s just one post, but before last month Gorhill would regularly post to Reddit about it. The MV3 extension is already live in the extension store as well.
Whole idea is weird and as of now its lacking features. Like no ability to look on the other instance local feed without registrating there (at least not in apps i use). Also needing to type whole adress with instance name if you want some community from other instance is unhandy.
Also, as far as i understand, there can be the same communities on different instances, so you could subscribe to, idk, cat community on lemmy.ml, but not see anything from cat community on lemmy.world. If its true its kinda stupid, i think there should be a way to associate comunities across fedarated instances.
Hell, even registration is kinda messed up. As lemmy.world shown, you easilly can sign up on overpopulated instances which would drop several times a day. Not sure, it probably fixed for now, but that was a problem when i started.
So far i like the idea and want it to succeed and become popular. But with how elitist people here are usually towards users from other platforms and with overall roughness it kinda seems unlikelly. Maybe it will change when current apps get better, or reddit app developers make versions for lemmy, idk.
Yes, but you would be seeing ALL posts from everywhere your instance knows about.
I kind of like the idea of being on lemmy.world, filtering to say aussie.zone and getting it to show me local.
Or being able to simply get a list of every community on another instance.
No, i mean not all, but local from other instances. I dont remember why i needed it, probably discussion of more specialised instances out there. Most down to earth example i can imagine now would probably be trying to find instance on your local language (other than english, ofc).
There are instances dedicated to other languages, but because they are new, and has not a lot of people, they won’t push at the top of your feed. The best thing for now is to help those instances grow by contributing to the instance and communities. As more activity sprouts, more and more specialized communities and instances will get pushed to the top.
As a start, you can select Hot or New rather than active and see if there are specialized regional instances. Or try directly searching for it.
If not start your own community in the language you desire. Bear in mind that lemmy only has 200k users. And most are probably from the US. So you’ll likely see more mainstream communities and in English.
If that’s still not enough, the best I can advise is to wait until it matures. The more mainstream it gets the more lesser known communities and regional instances can develop or start.
Yeah, probably. Still hope it will be an option in the future. I think the biggest jump in popularity gonna heppen when there is gonna be more developed apps for browsing it, considering that some QoL problems could be fixed by those developers.
I’m optimistic. So many apps are developing at an astonishing rate. Recall that third party apps offer better experience than official reddit. Given time, third party apps will do the same too.
Agreeing that it's not a seamless transition in user experience from Reddit to Lemmy/kbin. But one thing that at least the instance that I'm on (kbin.social) makes easy is subscribing to various communities (or magazines, which is what they are called on kbin):
I go to the Magazines screen in kbin.social, type.in the general topic I'm interested in (in your example, cats). The search results in kbin.social bring me all of the magazines and communities that have cat in the name, and I subscribe to them all. (Meaning, I don't have to type out the full community address.)
Yes, a lot of it will be redundant and if I don't subscribe to specific communities I may miss some stuff. But I can say that now I have a ton pf.contwct that I'm interested in my "Subscribed" feed (similar to the home feed on Reddit).
I dunno. Lemmy isn’t all that weird outside the first little bit of choosing an instance and signing up for communities. Everything since that has felt extremely normal to me. Some more thought about that and a good instance onboarding workflow can be implemented, that seems like a solvable problem.
I completely agree, I don’t find it difficult at all. But I have already tried to recommend it to a couple of friends and just having to go through those first steps was enough for them not to want to use Lemmy.
Lemmy isn’t weird at all. Now P2P platforms like secure scuttlebutt and aether, that’s some weird stuff. I couldn’t get them working at all (or maybe nobody is using these anymore). P2P is very confusing for me. I assume that a federated network is as confusing for many people as p2p social networks are confusing for me. I guess there will be someone out there who reads my comment and be like: “What? P2P networks are so simple, what don’t you understand?” I guess people just have different amount of tolorance to being confused by complexity of something before they just give up. I couldn’t figure out those P2P systems so I just give up.
I’m sorry, I don’t know if “general user” means what I think it means. English is not my first language.
What I meant was that most people who use the internet and social media on a regular basis aren’t exactly nerdy/tech-savvy. So as soon as you start talking to them about federated instances and whatnot, they lose interest.
But your content would go over so much better in those places. Pretty sure you’ve already found that your Musk-loving, antisemitic, anti-lgbtq+, misogynistic, garbage is not going to make it very far here. “cancel culture” back at it again. Guess Musk isn’t the big brain you think he is. I’m sure you’ll be back with your braindead zombie tribe in no time.
Reddit was too weird for most people until they ended up being in their Google search results for most topics. It will take a while but the Fediverse will eventually reach a level of popularity and mainstream utility.
Yeah I agree. Arguably reddit isn’t even mainstream, and it is exponentially larger than Lemmy now and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
I’m really loving Lemmy, but it is not even remotely a factor if we are having a conversation about things that are mainstream enough to reflect popular opinion.
We could have it both, where big instances like LemmyWorld or BeeHaw becomes the well known public interface, while they maintain federation with smaller instances.
I don’t interact with Reddit any more so it’s plain as day for me to see, when I do visit it, that the place changed considerably from the APIcalypse to now. It’s the decadence from the last ~5 years, except on steroids; brain drained, bots going rogue, users screeching at each other based on assumptions and mods doing nothing to handle it. Those trashy and large subreddits are fairly active, but it seems to me that activity for smaller subs went considerably down.
As cofounder and CEO Steve Huffman explained to The New York Times’ Mike Isaac, the company was concerned by how AI giants such as OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft were mining the wealth of knowledge in its discussion threads to train chatbots, thereby creating new competition for Reddit while it footed the bill.
And based on how he handled the third party apps, he’s likely omitting critical concerns.
And also, you know…
[User] I made something!
[Reddit Inc.] You made something? [snatches it] It’s mine. My precioooous!
“Reddit is an open platform, and we love that,” he told me. “
Holy shit, Greedy Pigboy’s ability to lie with a straight face never ceases to amaze me. It’s almost like he’s telling the interviewer “you’re gullible trash, aren’t you? Yes, you’re stupid, so are the things reading your article. I’m going to smear some bullshit on your snouts and you’re going to swallow it, like the filthy animals lacking human-like reasoning that you are.”
Sorry folks here for the tone. I can’t be bothered to read it further.
Potentially hot take: perhaps it’s time to punish Reddit Inc. and Greedy Pigboy, isn’t it?
The small subs matter a lot. Same principal as grocery stores, everyone carries the most popular products but the large variety of storm moving products keeps people coming to a specific store. Likewise any old website can have your basic selection of memes news politics Etc but the smaller communities are what make the place unique. We're basically at the point where for a lot of people those Basics are already met so Reddit having problems with their smaller subreddits means I'll be less to keep people around. Once those communities all make their way over here then there'll be nothing but generic slop. An audience of normies scrolling past slop can just vanish in an instant
If there was any potential in a “metaverse”, it would be picked up by people who know how to make something fun. In Silicon Valley or somewhere else.
That’s not happening because the metaverse is pointless. Most people prefer having multiple tabs in a browser to do online shopping, chatting with friends, etc rather than moving a 3D avatar from a virtual supermarket to a virtual cafe.
That’s not happening because the metaverse is pointless. Most people prefer having multiple tabs in a browser to do online shopping, chatting with friends, etc rather than moving a 3D avatar from a virtual supermarket to a virtual cafe.
Realistically, the only thing you’d actually want to do in the Metaverse is something you can’t do in real life, utilising the features of a virtual reality computer generated environment to do things that are physically impossible. If only there was some way you could use a computer, with or without a VR headset, to fly a spaceship, use magic, and explore beautiful environments. There could even be these computer generated characters that could give you ideas about things you could do and places you could go, by giving you a reason to go there and do those things, and all of this could tie into a narrative element that turns it into a kind of interactive story, so you’ve got a reason to keep engaging with the computer-generated environment and characters. And maybe you’d get some of that cool computer-generated swag while you’re there, which you could dress your avatar in…
Hmmm… there could be money in that idea. Someone should try making something like that.
If computer interaction benefited from being more ‘like reality’, then Microsoft Bob or any of the countless other attempts to create a reality- and/or 3D-based computer interface, would have caught on long ago.
The thing is, computer interaction can benefit quite a bit from a 3D space. I really liked what Microsoft did with WMR Portal and how it let you organize your apps simply by placing them in a 3D space, meaning you could have a cinema space with all your video related apps, a stack with games that you were playing, a stack with games you finished, etc. You could have frequently used webpages pasted to the walls. You could just grab the things, resize them and put them somewhere else. It was far more intuitive than any 2D interface I ever used and extremely customizable to your needs.
The problem was that it was also incomplete and unfinished in a lot of other ways and Microsoft just gave up on it. Outside of WMR Portal there has been surprisingly little effort into building good VR user interfaces and even less when comes to actively taking advantage of the 3D space (e.g. plenty apps still use drop shadows to simulate 3D instead of making the buttons actually 3D).
Will be interesting to see how well VisionPro does in this space. They seem to be a lot better with the basic UI elements than everybody else (e.g. dynamically lighting them to fit the AR environment and using real 3D), but at the same time, their focus on a static sitting experience without locomotion drastically limits how much advantage you can take from the 3D. Their main menu so far looks more like a table-UI stuck to your face than an 3D UI.
This has been tried and tried again, and it never catches on. Computer interfaces that are completely detached from physical 3D space are just much more flexible and easy to use.
This headline is clickbaity over exaggeration. It didn't "gut protections". The protections were already pretty terrible so this was more of a clarification. Prior, the court had sort of waffled on what "true threat" meant. This... didn't really help a great deal but it did clarify that both the reasonable person test and the reckless disregard tests had to be applied. I recommend reading Ken White's article https://popehat.substack.com/p/supreme-court-clarifies-true-threats. The big takeaway:
So. To the practitioner, or to the internet tough-talker, what does this mean? It means that the law of the land, at least 7-2, is that a threat is only outside the protection of the First Amendment if:
A reasonable person, familiar with the context, would interpret the threat as a sincere statement of intent to do harm, and
The speaker was reckless about whether the threat would be taken sincerely — that is, they “consciously disregarded a substantial risk” that it would be taken seriously.
Colorado's law played pretty loose with the reckless disregard aspect.
All that said, we need a better test, or better criteria to sort between some kid on LoL forums who trash talks and gets some mother in Canada worried (this actually happened) and when a woman reasonably fears for her safety based on persistent stalking.
People have been creating and posting realistic looking fake celebrity nudes for quite literally decades now, but now they’re using AI and its suddenly a problem?
I’m not sure if you noticed, but people who write for a living have suddenly started writing quite a lot about how technology that can write and generate media are bad.
Which is so silly, because AI writing still needs a human editor. I write for a living and there tons of work that involves using AI as a tool to increase productivity rather than to replace writers completely… like photoshop didnt put photographers out of business it just changed the work flow.
I work in a clinical setting where some Doctors are trying an AI program for generating their clinical notes out of the casual conversation between them and the patient. It’s way off its mark for what we demand in quality. It requires significant editing from the healthcare provider, and if the note is very robust it quickly becomes more of a chore than modern voice transcription. Our review is not great so far.
Sounds more like trying to use a screwdriver to hammer in screws
This is what I think about AI being forced into many things these days. Feels more like an attempt to justify subscription plans than anything actually productive.
In part this is because the SotA model is by far GPT-4, but OpenAI has pigeon holed it into ‘chatbot.’
The earliest versions of it pre-release when it was being incorporated into Bing were amazing. Probably the most impressive thing I’ve seen in tech.
But it was too human-like and freaking users out, so rather than wait for the market to adjust they did extensive fine tuning to make the large language model trained to predict human ouput be less likely to produce human-like output.
The problem is that they don’t have a scalpel for this sort of thing and ended up with a model that’s very good as a chatbot within a certain scope, but significantly impaired at some of the outside the box mechanics visible early on.
And because it’s the SotA, everyone is now using it to fine tune their own models.
So the entire industry is being set back in practical applications outside of “kind of boring chatbot.”
I can see why people are upset, I can agree that distribution of these images can be an issue, but this has the same energy of "I am mad that a certain picture of me is on the internet, I demand that they take it down." Sorry, that's not going to happen any time soon.
I don’t think many have gone viral on social media before or took less than 5 minutes to create. My uneducated guess is that previously this stuff would be in some niche forum in the recesses of the internet
You could be honest and acknowledge that there is a massive difference in time investment and skill required between the old way of creating fake porn of unconsenting people and the new way.
It's because a person can crank out a deep fake in 3 hours, and a crappy one in one. It never cropped up because... well lets be real it was a couple of weirdos that were doing it, unless it bubbles up from the dark corners of the internet you risk the Streisand effect by bringing attention to it.
AI can crank out 40 in a minute. 7200 in three hours. That's an entirely different beast. The sheer mass and volume ramps up the odds of any image bubbling up from the dark corners of the web falling into the limelight and now this problem that wasn't big enough to merit thought is rearing up it's ugly head right in front of us.
You can generate unique pictures of Taylor Swift faster than even Taylor swift can generate pictures of Taylor Swift. Within one hour of Taylor swift being seen with a man (and you have enough images of the man) you can create a dozen images of her on a date with that man and attempt to sell them to paparazzi.
The problem is volume. Just like how email made everyone connected and allowed the Nigerian Prince scandal to occur.
People don’t care now because people don’t thin famous people should have any right to dignity, but their minds are gonna change really quickly when it’s their sister, mother or daughter.
I honestly hadn’t considered that eBook licensing data could be used in the way they describe in the article. EBooks becoming part of big data surveillance somehow feels especially disheartening to me.
Lately I feel like I’ve been duped for years since I used to believe strongly in the phrase “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” but it feels like with every paid product or service nowadays you’re STILL the product…
Pirate the ebook, buy a paper copy to support the author (they generally even earn more per paper copy, iirc). Ideally at a local book store, as they are a dying breed as well.
Don’t like dead trees around? Gift it to someone. Or ask the local library if they want it
Lately I feel like I’ve been duped for years since I used to believe strongly in the phrase “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” but it feels like with every paid product or service nowadays you’re STILL the product…
Yep, I take issue with that phrase as well for two reasons.
like you say, most of the time you pay and your data is still harvested, because if you’re not collecting all that valuable data your shareholders will demand to know why you’re ignoring such a massive revenue stream.
plenty of stuff IS genuinely free without you being the product. FOSS as a general rule will not track you and you aren’t the product.
Now I appreciate that people who frequent Lemmy probably know about that exception to the rule, but plenty of people don’t, and I’ve seen people refuse to use open source software because they believe it being truly free is too good to be true, so they stick with an inferior paid-for alternative thinking some black box proprietary code is more private and secure so long as you paid for it.
That’s part of it. Another part is middle management can’t function without seeing you. Finally, it’s not worth it to a company to maintain a lease on a building if nobody works there and it’s not easy getting out of those leases.
I agree with most of this except the lease is a sunk cost, making people come in based on a variable that won’t change is bad decision making, the discussion should be made independently of lease. I agree some managers think this way, it’s usually the ones who could benefit from remedial business finance classes.
Yes and no. It’s more like a trap that the company is trapped in. It’s the corporate equivalent of having to keep renting an apartment you don’t live in anymore and can’t sub-let. The sunk cost fallacy applies, but also it’s a case of “we’re stuck with this and we’re going to USE it even if it kills our wage slaves.”
The larger issue may be that companies occupying the buildings supports interests of the owning class, and so its influence is being applied accordingly to shape the larger social forces.
I’m skeptical a company would take that. They want to be able to shut down contracts with employee on a whim but somehow they would engage for a 20 years in a building? If it’s not a big industry I severely doubt it, and those are rarely I city centers for obvious reasons.
What would you recommend to capitalists, for defending themselves from the broader population, that might be a superior alternative to using human shields?
It's very difficult to just burst into the mainstream without carving out a niche first, and Meta's Metaverse failed because they couldn't carve out that niche.
Though even if they had tried, the very tech nerds who would be their early adopters already don't trust them because of their shady deals (did anybody say Cambridge Analytica scandel?), so they weren't ever going to fork out money for this.
Not just their business practices, but also just the oculus purchase.
I already had an oculus. I was told (via press release) that I wouldn't have any issues with not having a Facebook account...only for them to turn around a little while later and require a Facebook login.
in general i'm baffled by most UX changes google pushes to their products. it just makes no sense to me, even if we're being generous with a profits-first perspective
you like that super convenient 1-click "remove" button on your youtube "watch later" list? let's make that a 2-click action by putting it under a dot menu with no other options in there
I think it’s change for the sake of change. The same reason why grocery stores redo their layout every couple of years. They want to make things appear ‘new’ while also keeping you on your toes in the hopes that you’ll buy more product.
They’ve been doing this for years now with Android. The biggest changes are always with icons and menu layouts now that they ran out of innovative ideas.
Grocery stores are actually a bit more sinister than that, they reorganize things periodically so people have to spend more time walking around the store and can impulse buy more. They are getting wiser though, they tend to do it more sectionally rather than the whole store so people don’t get as fed up.
Oh God, I swear our local supermarket moves the fresh fish every three weeks. It’s always the fish and it just fills me with rage. I don’t want to do a meter by meter search for a chunk of salmon while my picky children are whining and chewing on my kneecaps.
The whole Reddit debacle has really made me rethink all my services. I recently installed duck duck go and still getting used to it, so not quite sure if I’m ready to make another drastic change.
I used to love Firefox in 2006 or so, but got Chrome when it was released and forgot about Firefox. I think I’ll open a tab in my chrome browser for the Firefox page now…this is how I remind myself to delve deeper into stuff later. Thanks for the inspiration, everyone. Google has irked me ever since removing the Don’t Be Evil mantra.
If you like the chrome feel, you should check out a browser called brave. It’s built off of chromium (read as: looks like chrome) and can run all the extensions you like, but is built to be privacy minded.
The difference between ddg and Firefox for me is that Firefox is a genuinely good product, whereas ddg is noticeably worse than Google. Still trying to find a good search alternative.
I do all my personal browsing on Firefox now. I’m still using chrome, but strictly for work stuff. It’s nice to keep those activities separate, especially since many apps I use for work still discriminate against Firefox.
True. It takes a big chance to switch browsers for some. And there may be learning curves, but being intentional about our internet and app use goes a long way to saving headaches in the future. The early investment (ie learning a more open source and free, even FOSS software) will help mitigate loss in case a profit driven company changes or “pivots” to a new direction.
The best time to start with a new browser is when you get a new device. Since you have to re enter your logins or re enable your pw manager anyway, it’s just a convenient time. That’s when I switched, about 1 year ago when I upgraded phones.
Duckduckgo app tracking blocker is my new jam too. Which I leaned about here on lemmy about 1 weeks ago when I joined
If you use a password manager like bitwarden, there’s no need to enter all your logins. I guess that’s why I’m a bit browser agnostic. I use different browsers for different purposes. And I don’t have to worry about remembering my passwords with bitwarden.
Firefox has a super simple way to import everything from your Chrome install. And from what I can tell it has every feature plus more. Was very easy for me to switch. I was actually inspired to try it as my daily driver since Chrome hogs an uncomfortable amount of RAM on my laptop
There was one extension I used in Chrome that I haven’t found a Firefox replacement for, but I stopped trying to look a while ago and just live without it.
Was a specific kind of cookie manager: you could whitelist a set of websites to keep their cookies. Everything else would be deleted when you told the extension to do so.
Too many websites need cookies that stick around indefinitely. But I also don’t want to delete everything everytime I close Firefox, because I may want to keep a website around for a few days without wanting to bother adding it to a whitelist.
I want something more complex than a basic whitelist and blacklist. I already use that in Firefox and it helps somewhat but not wholly. I want to manage specifically when it happens and in accordance to said lists. I haven’t found anything that handles that in the settings.
Most Chrome extensions can easily be run in Firefox. Simply download the CRX and upload an copy to addons.mozilla.org as an unlisted extension and within a few hours the extension should be approved and ready to install in Firefox.
Reddit being enshittified is what motivated me to switch back to Android. I don’t want to continue using a a locked ecosystem only for apple to one day say: “Welp, no more adblocks 😜 Oh you use VLC? Dude that’s for pirates only. Signal? That’s for terrorists. Standard Notes? What evil plans are you hiding? Banned Banned and Banned.”
I used iPhones because everyone else was using them so I kinds fell for the peer pressure thinking “Hmm… what are the odds that Apple become evil? Probably don’t have to worry about it.” The Reddit shitshow just triggered a fear in me that made me rethink about my life decisions. Apple’s locked ecosystem suddenly looked terrifying to me, and I just wanna nope out. So I got an Android phone and gave the iPhone to someone. I love my apks and don’t need to worry about Google-Play shennanigans.
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