Is there any way to liberate existing ebooks now that Amazon has pulled the plug on downloading? An unfortunate friend of mine has “bought" Books from Amazon for thousands of euros and he just now finds out that he doesn’t seem to own them. I’d help him free his books if there is a possibility.

Even the part about Google Search only highlights the AI crap and skips over the real problem of increasingly worse search results. The whole article is more of a rant from a user’s perspective and there aren’t any real insights.

I don’t like how people are trying to stir up dissent and drama around this. The message posted is short and on point, it includes all the important bits. There really isn’t much more to add.

Of course they do. AI is aggressively marketed as such. Most people simply don’t know that an LLM doesn’t have a concept of "truth“, and the misleading marketing is to blame for that.

As a (Plasma based) Kubuntu user I was wondering as well. Looks like they tried to emulate the gnome look and feel in the picture. In Kubuntu the default taskbar is at the bottom and the floating application bar doesn’t exist

Why would anyone rename a perfectly valid variable name to some garbage term just to please our Microsoft Newspeak overlords? That would make the code less readable and more error prone. Also everything with human data has a field for sex or gender somewhere, driver’s licenses, medical applications, biological studies and all kinds of other forms use those terms.

But nobody really needs to use copilot to code, so maybe just get rid of it or use an alternative.

The hurdle is that Europe tends to adopt things that are successful in the US, because it is convenient. Even most services and startups based in Europe are more or less copies of US products, with some notable exceptions of highly specialised applications. This unfortunate trend started in the 1970s, when the largest industrial players in Europe thought semiconductors were just a fad and consequently lost their competitive edge. It was seen as less risky to invest in commercially proven concepts than to actually innovate. This continues to bite us in the ass to this day.

I don’t care about TikTok, but this smells like expropriation of the nazi kind.

https://www.jmberlin.de/en/topic-expropriation-arianization

Yeah, that was my thought too. What a dumb way to censor by search input instead of censoring the output.

It probably went like this at Meta:

Product Manager: Hey we just got this word filter list from HQ to be implemented ASAP.

Devs: Sure thing boss.

German news magazine Der Spiegel wrote they had talked to a Meta representative and they said “This is definitely an error and we will fix it fast”

My personal take: An incident like this illustrates how vulnerable we are to being censored and silenced when using social media and communication channels owned by billionaires. It’s time not only to leave those platforms but to educate your friends and family why this is absolutely necessary. No more excuses.

Original: Update, 13.30 Uhr: Auf SPIEGEL-Anfrage hat sich Meta inzwischen kurz und knapp zu dem Phänomen geäußert. »Dies ist eindeutig ein Fehler, den wir schnell beheben werden«, so eine Sprecherin des Konzerns.

Just tested in in the EU with a friend’s Instagram account. It’s real.

I completely forgot about this one. These clowns also think they are very clever in using thinly veiled Nazi symbolism in their publications. Like using the number 18 in their recent “Abschiebeticket” campaign (1 = A, 8 = H in the alphabet and is common code among themselves for Adolf Hitler) And when asked about that they smugly pretend being absolutely innocent.

If you need some context, Musk is actively trying to influence German elections by advertising for the far right party afd. While doing something similar in the UK with the right wing Reform party, and calling for a neo nazi to be released from prison.

So there’s that. It doesn’t even matter if this was a nazi salute or not, because it was clear that he is a fascist before this incident.

What’s the purpose of this? You have to supply a correct answer to make the ad go away?

I can only think of one example where some simple programming skills could benefit ordinary users: Home Automation. All the more difficult stuff is already neatly packaged into ready to use modules, and the user doesn’t have to worry about the ZigBee protocol or APIs or network ports to turn on a light bulb. Here some knowledge about conditionals, variables, loops can easily be used to program useful automations.

My take: It’s either not going to happen at all (which is what I would place my bets on tbh) or it’s going to be something that only megacorps like Google or Microsoft can offer due to the enormous requirements of such a system, which would make most of those AI companies redundant, not just their devs.

You wouldn’t even have to reach as far as malware. All software has bugs. To think that AI will produce perfect bugfree code because “it’s a computer” is laughable. So inevitably there will be a need to debug the code, across servers, filesystems, databases, APIs, you name it. In tens if not hundreds of thousands of lines of code, which might even be compiled. Surprise, an LLM can’t do that.

As a developer I always enjoy asking these clowns why anybody should buy their products when AI will soon allow consumers to build these apps themselves, which is just a logical progression if you don’t need coders to create software.

I know of course that this isn’t going to happen anytime soon. It’s wishful thinking from their part and it shows a complete lack of understanding both what LLMs can and cannot do and what it takes to design and implement anything bigger than a batch script.

Edit: I also can’t help but feel personally offended whenever some corporate drone gloats about replacing developers. It didn’t happen with low-code, it didn’t happen with no-code and it won’t happen with AI. But it hurts every time.

Especially considering the last Spongebob movie was an atrocious 3d animated abomination. Oh god, I sound like Squidward.

VLC always had a ton of applications, network device playback, TV, streaming server, files, physical media, music player, effects, recording, AV format conversion, subtitles, plugins and so on.