fwygon

@fwygon@beehaw.org

Beehaw alt of @melody

@fwygon on discord

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fwygon,

These are the kinds of cops that should be summarily fired on the spot and not ever given a badge again. Such sickening behavior.

fwygon,

Gabe Newell knows that any potential buyer will run Valve into the ground. Thus he already promised too long ago that he would never sell or let Valve go public.

Considering how many game studios that Microsoft just killed off in the last 3 years alone; they’re never going to be worthy of buying Valve.

fwygon,

This is pretty clearly a company practiced at “riding the waves” of what’s popular to sell absolute bullshit.

They appear to raise millions, develop what looks like a minimally viable product for it’s development phase, then pull the rug out and exit with the bag of cash, quickly pivoting away from discovered scams and name changing to avoid too much consumer ire or regulator scrutiny.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the CEO or anyone else at the top levels of this company has an entire resume full of these sorts of ‘scam and run’ operations, the kinds that melt into the background and vanish the moment any real strong consumer or regulatory/legal scrutiny hits it.

Basically this is investment fraud 101; you find something you can trick people into investing into, then spend as little as possible to get a ‘minimally viable product’ that appears plausible enough to give you time to exit stage left with all the fat cash you can take. Because this sort of operation does produce something; oftentimes they get away cleanly; because they did do something and oftentimes they obscure or obfuscate and hide the evidence of any planned malfeasance; usually the only places with any record of it is in the mind of the CEO or other executive(s), if they’re in on the scam too.

Sometimes the CEO gets ‘caught’ intentionally and then fired…or they just run the company into the ground. That latter case can let them off the hook with a tidy golden parachute as well; depending on the circumstances and what they ‘negotiated’ when they were ‘hired’.

fwygon,

NOPE!

You cannot pay me to use Windows 11.

fwygon,

Censorship like this is one fast track to things like the French Revolution.

fwygon,

The shoe fits on the other foot as well. Both extreme communism and extreme capitalism have tendencies to turn into dystopian nightmares.

If ‘1984’ alarms you; so too should current works like ‘Ready, Player One’ or ‘Ender’s Game’ and it’s associated sequels.

Extremism in general tends to not work. I don’t pretend to know what the exact right balance is; but it does exist.

fwygon,

Even a progression from “Closed Source” to “Source Available” is nice progress I think.

If we assume that the License is not restrictive we may be able to fork Winamp into a codebase that might actually be Fully Open Source Software and track changes of the upstream as we need.

fwygon,

This kind of website sounds kind of problematic and useless. The ability to follow a specific person’s post is highly useful, and highly necessary oftentimes. If you want to reduce the friction that “Following” induces; you simply need to not disclose to the users how many people are following them, nor do you need to disclose how many followers a user has. Problems solved.

The same goes for Likes. Nobody but the sender of the like should know about that like. Instead of keeping counts for the recipients to obsess over; calculate a reasonable percentage of people who we can guess “like” the post algorithmically based on views of the post and clicked likes. I get that the feedback mechanism is necessary; but it should be a gentle one that simply encourages people to post what people like and will view. This percentage should not be used to rank a post above or below other posts, unless the user viewing the list asks for the list to be sorted or ranked as such.

fwygon,

Minimum SDK also does get bumped in Android in general at a snails pace. Given that we’re basically coming up on Android 15; it’s not unfair to assume that, eventually, we will simply see Android intentionally and permanently REFUSE to run the app because it’s Minimum SDK value is considered to be too low and thus Android must assume that the application is completely insecure.

fwygon,

The largest barrier for me in FLOSS and FOSS applications is simply a lack of GUI tools for what is considered to be “Advanced” functions.

Just because I can do it on linux doesn’t mean it’s easy or intuitive. Unfortunately a lot of FOSS and FLOSS applications are, of necessity, extremely limited in what tasks they are targeting. Frequently you cannot rely on the “alternative” to have a relied upon function or feature until deep in it’s lifecycle; when finally enough people have complained and the feature is implemented.

Sometimes a feature is never implemented due to an entirely shifted paradigm in the way the program is implemented and the feature is “impossible” or “inconsistent with xyz”.

One example of this is the number of GUIs and frontends written for ffmpeg; many of which simply are lazy GUI implementations of what the ffmpeg CLI binary itself will helpfully print out in the console when you ask it for help with the correct switch(es). Many are even less thought out than this and will often unhelpfully provide an obtuse box at the bottom for custom commands you wish to feed to the program…which is great if you know the command(s); but make using the GUI unhelpful when compared to just firing up a CLI and reading the output and figuring out the correct command for exactly what you want it to do.

Keep in mind; I am not at all uncomfortable with using CLI interfaces; I just expect that a GUI doesn’t force me to fallback, or become so unusable that I am forced to fall back on an original CLI tool because I cannot possibly discern why it failed to work

Frequently things that would be simply be an option buried deeply in the GUI menus only and are otherwise fairly simple are relegated as being only possible within a CLI interface; and I find that reality quite infuriating most often…as the limitations of a CLI oftentimes make the task I am trying to complete far less simple than it really should have been.

fwygon,

I can do everything Kagi does for free…using SearXNG.

fwygon,

I pay nothing for running SearXNG locally on my machine.

fwygon,

The nice thing is that I can customize it however I like too; change weights, choose which engines to pull from always, or even from search to search; so I’m not getting cruft.

SearXNG always rearranges the crap most engines serve to the bottom without fail.

fwygon,

I genuinely won’t even use Brave indexes on my SearXNG instance; I have the engines disabled. My search quality has not suffered; as most of my results end up being DDG or Yahoo anyways; and Brave was only ever duplicating results from other engines anyways.

fwygon,

To be honest the “Privacy” aspect can be taken care of in other ways; like using a VPN for query dilution, for example. You don’t have to recruit 100 mechanical turks to do junk searches for you; although there are browser addons that can in fact do this automated searching for you…I’ve run them before.

SearXNG is a front-end that protects your privacy still. Hosting it locally dilutes it some; but provides maximal control; as you can use VPNs and control things much more tightly than you could if you hosted it elsewhere.

fwygon,

Your argument clearly shows that you fail to see the benefits of doing it yourself. I get quality results from my local instance due to my persistence and work put in to adjust the settings necessary. I’ve balanced the privacy and functionality of the instance to fit my needs and it costs me nothing but a few minutes of my time each week to do so.

Kagi doing it for $10 a month sounds like they’re turning a neat profit off of you; and you’re refusing to accept that I have achieved levels of search competence that Kagi has without paying for Kagi or even using their free searches or service.

Whether or not it makes sense to you value-wise to pay or not pay for Kagi does not matter in this discussion. it only matters that none of the things Kagi can do that I find useful are things that cannot be done with SearXNG.

fwygon,

You do have to host it yourself or run your own personal instance to get the power of SearXNG; if you’ve not tried this, please do not write it off.

If hosting it yourself or even running it locally in a container on your machine at home is too technical for you; nobody is going to bane you for that. In fact there’s several guides and videos out there that might help you if you’re inclined to learn.

If not; you’re also free to continue consuming as you do.

fwygon,

SearXNG has fediverse search functionality too.

fwygon,

Why is this four year old story being reposted?

fwygon,

Google killing more features like this makes me absolutely certain that they have no fucking idea what they’re doing over there.

But this isn’t a shock; they’ve been dumbing down the “Assistant” by slowly removing useful features ever since Siri pulled down the Assistant’s Google colored skirts and panties and spanked it with her capabilities. Heck even Alexa joined in on the hazing, smiling smugly as she accumulates ability after ability, and being a literal voice powered “Buy it now!~” button.

I haven’t used Google Assistant since like Android 7; where they were STILL removing features and adding more useless ones. Genuinely I can’t understand why the layoffs had to cause these reductions in functionality unless they were also hiring 3rd world Mechanical Turks to transcribe and do all the work.

Even more frustrating is that the Assistant hasn’t changed much besides bleeding off features every year, when they could’ve been working to correctly integrate AI into the Assistant, which would’ve made her 1000x more intelligent and useful.

I still remember how unhelpful Assistant is if you don’t give her exactly the right command with exactly the right wording. Unlike Siri or Alexa, there’s absolutely minimal effort to ensure smooth Natural Language Processing happens when it benefits the user.

fwygon,

Personally I think a little fiscal conservation would be wise at this point.

Costs can, and do eventually, rise. Hardware fails, and other things can happen as a surprise; and I’d rather that Beehaw not be insolvent when those things happen.

While I get the wish to do fun things to enhance the community; I think we need to be keeping an eye on things too. A few bad months where users are squeezed and unable to contribute could also severely impact Beehaw; particularly in and around monthly costs. At no point should Beehaw admins be paying out-of-pocket for things if Beehaw itself as an organization has the funds to properly pay things.

If we do genuinely have too much funding in excess; examining how we could expand Beehaw or make it better is another way you can responsibly re-invest the funds into making Beehaw better.

Additional servers/services might be neat; things like:

  • A Mastodon server, if one doesn’t already exist
  • A Matrix homeserver, if one doesn’t already exist
  • A lightweight Pixelfed / image hosting/posting Service, if one doesn’t already exist
  • Various and miscellaneous game servers/services like Minecraft or other popular multiplayer game servers/sessions/instances.

Of course such things could also require additional staff on hand, so I understand that you might want to entice someone to help manage these extra things first.

fwygon,

I’d rather Beehaw didn’t leave Lemmy outright; but I can hardly fault anyone for looking into other alternatives and spinning them up alongside the current Lemmy instance, getting that new thing up and thriving and then slowly migrating away from giving Lemmy so much attention.

fwygon,

Mastodon, for example, would have far better moderation tools than lemmy. As for your concerns with “Adding more moderation hurdles”, genuinely I feel recruiting more mods before and while you spin up a service is fine. That may mean you take time to pick them out and train them right. That’s fine. But I don’t think moderation challenges are insurmountable.

fwygon,

This. I like Beehaw and I respect it’s nature. I even maintain an account here just to separate my more boisterous posting personality from the one that I feel safer in expressing on Beehaw. While I do external-post from my other account; that’s usually to respond to either Beehaw users not behaving in a way I feel is consistent with Beehaw values or to address others from external instances.

But I don’t want to see Beehaw closing it’s doors to the fediverse. If your staff team is getting swamped, you’re getting overwhelmed as admins, etc…then find more staff. You literally have the hugest pool of nice people right here on Beehaw, and I’m sure everyone who regularly posts here would likely be highly skilled at moderating somewhere on Beehaw if needed. Most of the time, Beehaw does not attract nasty people, and the hard work of the moderation done here shows.

Spread the load. Don’t defederate or give up on Fediverse. Invest in mental health buffs for your moderation team as needed if necessary!

fwygon,

Unpaid internships really do need to be abolished.

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