When it comes to dealing with advertisements when they’re surfing on their browsers. I’ve just learned recently about how Google has or is killing UBlock Origin on the Chrome browser as well as all Chromium based browsers too.
We’ve heard for years about people complaining, bitching, whining and vice versa about how they keep seeing ads. And those trying to help them, keep wasting time to tell these people that they’re surfing without extensions. Whether it’d be on Chrome or Firefox or another browser.
By this point, I’ve long stopped being that helper because if you cared at all about the advertisements you see, you would’ve long had gotten on the wagon of getting adblockers by now. You bring this onto yourself.
Before calling support, turning your device off and back on again will legitimately resolve 90% of your issues.
If you call the helldesk and the uptime of your device is more than 24 hours and you said you already rebooted it how can we trust anything else you say?
Now, conversely, if you work in support, please ACTUALLY FUCKING LISTEN TO ME when I am telling you I’ve already done that 17 different ways, along with tons of other troubleshooting and isolating and I’m not a technical moron and I tried every possibility to avoid calling you so can we PLEASE SKIP THE USUAL BULLSHIT SUGGESTIONS?!?!?!?!
I hate it too but they don’t because everyone claims they know what they’re doing and they’ve already tried all that stuff.
99% of the time it turns out they haven’t and that was the problem.
I don’t often need support, but when i do, i try to make it clear that i kinda know the deal and i tried everything in my power to make it work for days, and calling in support isn’t my first instinct. But i completely understand why they treat you like a dummy.
That’s the difference from a good support tech and a bad one tbh. Bring able to gauge someone’s tech literacy and taking in all troubleshooting done before is literally the first thing you should do. So many escalations I’ve received just has “had user reboot, had them disconnect and reconnect to network. Checked and device has no pending updates, sending to L3.” in the notes. Half of the time a reboot really wouldn’t do anything, and they really just needed to be added to an AD group (most of my tickets last week). I’m just glad I’m shifting out of support and more into projects.
Honestly, they can’t. The way IT works is there’s multiple levels. First level, second level, third level. Whenever anybody calls in, they get first level, which are usually either inexperienced people, new people, or people with no experience whatsoever, and they’re all reading scripts. They’re the gatekeepers for level 2, 3, and 4, the people who actually know what they’re doing. It’s because 99 out of 100 people don’t know shit and it just needs to be restarted and they would clog up the time of people who actually know what they’re doing and nothing would ever get done.
And if one of those level one guys accidentally lets through somebody who should have been taken care of by their script, they will get reamed the fuck out for wasting people’s time who gets paid more an hour than they do a day.
If I was support, had a list to work through because my calls were monitored and recorded, and you were being a complete know-it-all asshole, I would walk through them as slow as possible, and repeat as many as I could plausibly get away with.
Because that’s the actual job: following instructions from their boss, which means following their processes. Why would they deviate from that, and risk their job, for someone who’s rude, and/or self-important?
As someone who’s also technically competent and rarely calls support, when I do, I’ve never had to repeat the same steps 17 times, or even 3 times.
I let them tell me to turn off and on again, confirm it’s done, explain why I need a level 2 support or escalation. Then they’ll typically ask me one or two more questions, which I’ll politely answer, reiterate my polite request for level 2, and they will escalate for me.
Almost any support position to do with phones is horrible to help people with. No one wants to turn it off. No one wants to understand their bill. No one accepts how data is used. No one thinks they need to pay for their devices. It’s a vast landscape of ignorance and entitlement.
tbf, I have rebooted my system and uptime didn’t also reset. It appears that newer Windows has this “fast startup” feature. Pinky swear I told the truth.
Any proper it system will have that turned off because fast boot only applies to devices with spinning disks. If you have a SSD as your boot device there is no advantage to it.
Any proper it system
No True Scotsman would ever enable such a feature!
You are correct. However, I don’t mess with my work computer and let the IT department manage it. Sometimes, they manage poorly.
Did you restart or shutdown? Shutdown is more like hibernate, restart should be a proper reboot.
Because I rebooted it last week and still had the problem last week after rebooting and I was lazy about making a ticket.
Helldesk.
That if they vote third party before we can get rid of the first-past-the-post system, they are helping their ideological opposite. And a corollary: if they do it because of the genocide in Gaza and Trump encourages a total wipeout of the Palestinian state like he’s telegraphing, the blame for the deaths of those innocent civilians is on them for being self-righteous instead of honest.
It’s like everyone forgot the absolute basics of game theory
That we’re all prisoners in a prisoner’s dilemma?
I just got banned from a sub for trying to explain this exact thing. Their response was “not that’s not how voting works - if I vote for a person, they get my vote. If I don’t vote for someone, they don’t get my vote.” and “Harris is literally saying the same thing.” I sent a thank you to the mod for banning me because my brain was breaking.
I have been trying to figure out how to combat this bullshit argument succinctly. So far I am at this:
If you vote for a person, it tips the ratio of votes they recieve (which is the only important thing in our system) in their favor. If you vote third party, not only does the ratio of votes between the two forerunners not change, but you completely throw away your representation.
The way the system is set up right now means that only half of the voting population is even represented by the elected person.
I worry about the state of this country. Half the country doesn’t understand tax brackets, I don’t expect them to ever understand the problem with FPTP or learn about RCV
At those times I love the two rounds system. It’s a pain in the arse to go vote twice, and it is by no means perfect, but you can still vote based on your conscience without “wasting” your vote.
For example. This month we got mayor elections here. There were 10 candidates in the first round; I voted in a socialist as usual. They had zero chance to win, but showing them some support is a big deal in the long run - it shows that at least some people are interested in their platform.
Then in the second turn we had Total Piece of Shit vs. Somewhat Shitty. Then I simply voted in Somewhat Shitty to make things not so bad.
You’re not helping the ideological opposite. What you’re doing is removing the vote from one of the larger parties that are going to win regardless. The system is rigged against 3rd party and 3rd party will never win the presidency or any major office. At least while the Electoral College is a thing. We should stop with this mindset of “A vote for 3rd party is a vote for the opposition” because it’s just propaganda to remove what little power 3rd parties have.
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Lemmy really is becoming a great replacement for reddit, it feels just like I’m back there.
I wasn’t aware I was here to care about your opinion. I’m always happy to learn new things about myself
Such an enlightened opinion.
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Maybe little parties would have more power if they demonstrated actual political power in local elections instead of trying to win pointless votes in the national election.
It doesn’t matter. The US political system is deliberately weighed against 3rd party
their ideological opposite
You think the ideological opposite of anti-genocide progressives isn’t a person responsible for genocide, who spent their career imprisoning mostly black men, and who promises to spend hundreds of millions funding a border wall?
instead of honest
Projection much?
They were likely referring to Trump. Trump is probably the opposite of anti-genocide progressives
The delusions in this space are astounding. Trump is actually responsible for the ongoing genocide??
a person responsible for genocide, who spent their career imprisoning mostly black men, and who promises to spend hundreds of millions funding a border wall
In the the US laws are passed by the legislative branch, in particular laws around spending are passed by the House of Represtatives. Currently the House or Representatives is controlled by the Republican party, the party of which Donald Trump is the undisputed leader. As such Trump has sufficient control over the Republican party to broadly control the parties legislative priorities, including spending. In fact he has already used this authority to enact his legislative priorities around spending and immigration reform among other things.
Donald Trump has directed the Republican party to support the genocide in Gaza, so the Republican party provides the funding necessary to for the IDF to conduct the genocide in Gaza.
Additionally when Donald Trump was president he did several things to empower Israel including moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and required all Palestinian affairs to go through this embassy.
While the Democratic party has played a part in supporting the genocide, Donald Trump and the Republican party absolutely have the power to stop the US from passing funding bills to arm the IDF and help stop the genocide. Instead he and the Republican party he leads enthusiastically support what Israel has been doing in Gaza and now are trying to do in Lebanon. There’s every reason he’ll take the US’s support for the genocide even further.
Donald Trump somehow controls Biden-Harris’s foreign policy??
"There has been no division of labor or dispute on policy. Vice President Harris shares President Biden’s support for an ironclad US commitment to Israel’s security coupled with a commitment to advancing a two-state solution in order to bring an end to this cycle of violence.” - A US official (Source: “Not the bad cop: Biden officials say Harris won’t shift course on supporting Israel”)
“Biden restricted and conditioned U.S. arms transfers to Ukraine but worried that doing the same to Israel might tempt Hezbollah to attack it. So Biden kept the arms flowing (with the exception of at least one shipment of 2,000-pound bombs) and never imposed serious restrictions on their use.”
““The United States supports Israel with weapons, funds aid packages, and has vetoed or abstained from the United Nations’ cease-fire resolutions.”
IIRC, Donald Trump said he’d have ended the genocide sooner…by giving more support to Israel to “finish the job” of eliminating Palestine/Palestinians more quickly. So if that’s the alternative you support, then by all means, don’t vote for Harris.
Who do you believe is buying a fear mongering hypothetical over the actual reality of genocide happening thanks to Biden and Harris?
Voting third party is a protest vote against the regime.
It seem like yall have hard time understanding what a proper opposition is.
@[email protected] is arguing practical impact. You’re arguing intent. You will never agree to anything if you continue to keep discussing different topics disguised as the same.
Also what I learned from Jill Stein is that 3rd parties never try local elections in states, cities. They seem to only pop up in national elections to steal votes and make no impact
Well then vote for your team
And when they inevitably fail, that is only fuel for the fire for third-party denialists who’ll go “SEE?! THIRD PARTEH WILL NEVER WORK!”. Then they’ll go back to voting two parties who actively fuck everyone over, it’s just one party fucks over a little less than the other.
The impact he is discussing assumes that person voting 3p would automatically voting for his team. That’s statistically speak at best half right.
No, its not like that at all.
It doesn’t matter who Meh and Oh no are for that voter. The results are the same.
If you have a Meh candidate, and Oh No candidate, and a Please Something Else candidate, and you vote for something else, its now easier for Oh No to get elected, because Meh has fewer votes.
I am no emotionally invested in either regime whore.
My position is to deny both engagement.
And I’m sure the Germans who “never supported the Nazi’s” were proud of their acts of abstinence after the fact.
Its a terrible system with FPTP for sure, but doing anything that makes it easier for really bad guys to get in power is enablement, full stop.
Will the really bad guys care about a protest vote? No, they’ll thank you.
Will the not so bad guys care about the protest vote if they get elected? Not really, they got elected while ignoring the voice of the people, so why change?
To fix the system you need to get the least worst option elected, and then get out and protest, and cause as much pain for the elected officials as possible to get anything changed. Means protesting at a level that is significantly impacting the economy.
Don’t fuck around with a ‘protest vote’ that’s going to do as much nothing as electing the Meh option.
Yes voting for 3p is the vote for “nazi” 🤡
and as a result you will get the Oh No regime
I have been suffering udner the two party regime all my life.
After this election, it will still be the two party regime 🤡
Let our boy CGP Grey handle that for you:
Third party can work on solid states. Using 2020 numbers, if every Trump voter in California had voted third party, California would have still went to Biden. But there’s an alternative result that would come out. If a third party candidate gets 5% of the popular vote, they are eligible for over $120M in federal funding for the next election. Obviously he Ds and Rs spend way more than that, but a third party could make use of that money. And it only affects the next election really.
yeah just getting some people around to the whole idea that, right now, voting is part of how we all have to work together to get along somehow on this big rock, and that means compromises sometimes. sometimes ugly compromises.
The importance of digital privacy and freedom. The way capitalism ruins everything you like.
Worked at a major tech company as a data engineer, constantly warn everybody that major tech company is doing crazy surveillance, nobody cares. Told everybody my job was taking economists and research scientists python models, translating them into production code for data pipelines that would operate on terabytes of streaming data and it would change our recommendation system on the fly to keep you on the page. It was designed by academics to prey on basic human instincts. Tons more sketchy stuff, but I always felt like that was the most predatory. All we need to know was your zip code and gender and we knew how to recommend you stuff you wanted, and then people would voluntarily give us more identifying information.
The dangers of conservatism/fascism.
If not for conservatism, humans would be proactively addressing global heating. Conservatives oppress the innocent and vulnerable in every country where conservatives have power. If not for conservatism, there would be no genocide. Conservatives are the gullible, deadly foot-soldiers of the billionaires.
Conservatism is the single biggest threat to life on earth. Eradicating conservatism would be the single most positive change we could make to preserve life on earth.
Conservatism should be used as a moderator. If Libertarianism is left unchecked it will try to solve all the problems all at once, running out of resources before even achieving a proper solution. Ideally the Parliament should be roughly split into 5ths with each part representing an important area (environmentalist, economist, socialism/communalism, etc.). Then through coalitions, in which conservatism should always be a part of the most relevant problems can be targeted in a moderated sense.
I wish it was acceptable to call older folks out as lazy if they refuse to learn how to text, email and otherwise use the internet. It’s fine for them to call millennials lazy if they can’t drive a stick shift or balance a checkbook, but if you’re giving me bullshit like “I’m 68 years old, I don’t text and I don’t email” you are just a lazy, stubborn bastard. I’ve met plenty of 90 year olds who are perfectly capable because they aren’t lazy old fucks.
Seriously, of all people they’re the ones that have been around since the internet’s inception. They’ve had more time to adapt than anyone.
I’m not sure that flies for boomers. That’s the X’ers: my adult life pretty much matches the history of PCs, so I better know how to use them.
However my parents were older when PCs appeared, and at the time there seemed no reason to learn about them. Ok, my Dad was an engineer who built them, but my Mom never had any reason to use a computer until the Facebook era, when lots of regular people started to use email. It was still quite common at the time for adults to not see a purpose, so I give boomers a pass
Even if someone doesn’t regularly use computers, it doesn’t hurt to gain some experience in communicating in ways you’re not used to. Like, I don’t like ‘typing’ on a mobile phone. The interface is small, customization is limited and you’re prone to constantly make spelling mistakes. But I adapted and can at least now type on mobile half the speed I can on a keyboard.
Generational gaps need not apply. This is simply just a learning thing that is applicable to all.
When you’re at a fast food drive thru and they offer to round up for a charity cause, YOU can claim that write-off donation on your taxes, not the restaurant. Of course virtually nobody would do that unless you save your receipts and tally them up next year… but you can!
Related, I tire of explaining tax deductions are over valued. It’s a net loss to you to spend money on something deductable and claim the deduction. If you have $100, the government takes $20 and you get $80. If you give that $100 to charity, you have $0, the government gets $0, and the charity has $100.
Deductions are only good if you value the thing that the money went to.
I thought you couldn’t even write off charity unless it was some stupidly high amount. Last time I looked into it, it basically just seemed like a tax grift for rich people
I think it’s because for most people the standard deduction is way higher than itemized.
You need to have enough to make it worthwhile over the standard deduction. That’s 14.6k in donations, mortgage interest, state taxes paid, and other things like that.
You only get a percentage, depending on your state. It’s not much… not many people bother (big market for boomers lol)
I never thought about that, but it makes sense
but then you have to do itemized deductions which takes forever and unless you’re mister moneybags or in an unconventional life situation, the standard deduction is almost definitely better. also tax write offs are not free money, you still gave the money to some sketchy “charity” it’s just the government doesn’t get a slice of that.
All true… I’m just pointing it out because people are constantly railing about how the donation is supposedly a “free writeoff for the big businesses!111” when in reality isn’t true. I hate shitty big restaurants as much as the next guy but this ain’t it
That the covid pandemic is still going full tilt and still demands a very aggressive worldwide response.
Everybody (over the age of 4–they were born in 2020!) knows it, they just deny it like crazy because they don’t have the balls to deal with how unpleasant it is.
Which makes it infinitely more unpleasant because we aren’t lifting the weight together. But anybody still denying the pandemic is consciously deciding to do it, and an explanation isn’t going to make them un-decide, because it’s not a lack of knowledge.
Influenza typically accounts for 1.5% of deaths at its peak every year. Covid has been hovering around 3%. So it’s currently about the same level as a bad flu season. To me this indicates endemic levels. If there is a strain that suddenly starts killing more people, it will make headlines. I’m not trying to be in denial, this is just where I’m at. I’ve had it, and my immune system is doing what it is supposed to do. I’m not worried about contracting it again, unless the a new deadly strain comes out.
This is where I’m at too. I was literally just talking to my friend about this last night.
We both know of several people who feel very strongly that the pandemic is still in full swing. They won’t go out of their house without a mask, they get their groceries delivered, they won’t come to any social events for fear of getting sick, and they only work from home. They’ve basically trapped themselves in their house, out of fear.
In my opinion, which is only an opinion, I think these people have an undiagnosed mental illness. Some sort of excess anxiety that was triggered by the events of lockdown and the early pandemic, and now they are unable to reset back to normal.
I don’t mean that in a bad way or a rude way, I’m legitimately concerned for these people and don’t know how to help.
For your average Joe, COVID is just a reality we live with. I don’t want to get it, but I can’t afford to lock myself down, nor do I think it would be healthy for me mentally if I did.
I don’t think it’s good for you physically either. I have been exposed to Covid, probably every few months. The immune system needs to actually see viruses in order to keep making antibodies.
Even in mild cases of COVID in healthy younger people it has cognitive impacts. What you believe is false.
I’m aware of long covid risks. My belief to which you are replying is that exposure to viruses is important to continue making antibodies. The study indicates a 25% risk of cognitive impacts from mild COVID cases. I’m not alarmed by that number, and I’m not seeing how it should change my belief about immune system health.
By the year 2100, ambient CO2 will reach 1000 ppm (1 ppt), which is associated with a 10-15% decline in cognition. In many indoor spaces, CO2 levels are much higher than this. I actually got CO2 up to 1800 ppm just driving my car with the air turned off. Anybody who works indoors in a building is at risk of impaired cognition.
Even having a mild case of COVID has cognitive impacts in healthy people. It’s really really really actually very terrifying.
Is it still full tilt?
Looking at CDC graphs of excess deaths, it appears we’re back at baseline. That is, assuming I’m reading this correctly which is very much not a sure thing.
Everyone all denial about diseases and serious illnesses until they get it. Unfortunately, during the pandemic, some of those who did get COVID and denied about it, still downplayed it like it was just a simple cold. Until you know, some of them actually died because of how much they didn’t anticipate the probability of getting it.
Dude wake up, Covid was the biggest scam in history of humanity!
You dropped this: /s
Actually two things:
First: Capitalism is bad. It gets so bad it will destroy people the worst way: both mentally and physically. And it will destroy our planet more sooner than later. We need to get rid of „the rich“, switch to a social stable System and actually care about our environment (aka climate) immediately to stop the worst. It is already way too late to stop the catastrophe entirely, but some of us still can survive.
Second: Voting for faschist and racist parties will hurt you badly. They don‘t want what’s best for the common people, they want power.
I wish we fucking lived longer so the people who doomed our planet would be alive when it starts burning. I hate that their selfishness will go completely unpunished, and that they get to die happy and comfortable in their beds after sentencing billions to death.
Looks at Republican party
You don’t need to stop informing others, I think stopping is bad. Just tune it down a bit, don’t overexert yourself with it. Most will not care but it’s still important to tell it to them. At some point, they might realize why it’s a good idea.
Also, Google isn’t immediately killing Ad/Content Blockers like uBO, they’re doing it slowly. Which is much smarter. It will mean less resistance. Boiling the frogs (users) slowly has always been the best way of eventually reaching a certain goal, without too much resistance along the way. If you push the goal too fast and too hard, there will be massive resistance, backed by an immediate media backlash. You have to wait that out, spread it out, so that users and media forgets about it again. Also, uBO Lite for MV3 browsers is less effective, but many users won’t notice a difference yet. Next steps will probably be to make it less and less effective over time, while claiming it will be better for the users overall, like offer better security from malicious addons that almost no one installs anyway, or whatever.
You don’t need to stop informing others, I think stopping is bad. Just tune it down a bit, don’t overexert yourself with it. Most will not care but it’s still important to tell it to them. At some point, they might realize why it’s a good idea.
And in public forums, it’s also helpful for the next person who comes along. If that person is only exposed to one “side”, they may never know there is an alternative.
Vaccines. I gave up trying to gently educate my coworker and instead am waging an outright campaign via Facebook to terrorize her into vaccinating her poor sickly autistic son. Every journal article and news piece on preventable disease, I’m posting it, and am having long winded chats on my page about how measles wipes your immune memory and how a kid died of that in the community a few months ago. Parents of antivaxxers should have their children apprehended by CPS. It’s child abuse.
These answers reek of superiority complex. These are less “educating” others and more that so many of you have decided something specific is a big deal to you and in a proselytizing fashion you preach to others and when they don’t give a shit or perhaps just dont have the emotional capacity to ALSO care about the thing you brought up, you take that as ignorance, when really it’s just some people don’t feel like caring that much about that specific concern you decided is uber important.
People aren’t built to endless worry about every little horrible problem surrounding them and the world every fucking day.
Also, this whole forum feels like overreaction too. Just because “some” people didn’t care for your input doesn’t mean all didn’t, but a lot of people overreact online. It’s coupled with the usual “am I the only one who…” kind of crap. No. You aren’t. You aren’t the only genius who understands the world is shit and we’re fucked.
Seems nobody will ever put sanity and social safety over their feelings. People don’t really understand the social contact anymore. They think that’s for everyone else.
Reading more than a headline.
That AI safety is much more important than AI hurting copyright or artists.
I say this because the “AI sucks haha” and “AI just steals” retoric is very harmful to AI safety movement as people just don’t believe AGI or even close-to-AGI will be capable enough to harm our society.
Currently many estimate that there’s 1-20% chance that AGI could end our civilization. So fuck the copyright and fuck the artists when we’re looking at ods like this we need to start preparing now even if it’s 10 years away.
But alas, nobody can’t think further out than the length of their nose and honestly I’m just hoping we’re lucky enough to be in that 80% because clearly we’re not going to do anything about it.
That would require an actual AGI to emerge, which it has not and is not going to. LLMs are fancy text prediction tools and little more.
Are you assuming LLMs are the only way humans could ever try making an AGI? If so, why do you assume that?
I agree that AGI is dangerous but I don’t see LLMs as evidence that we’re close to AGI, I think they should be treated as separate issues.
Given what I think I know about LLMs, I agree. I don’t think they’re the path to AGI.
The person I replied to said AGI was never going to emerge.
I had meant to say AGI would never emerge from our current attempts at creating them.
There’s more important shit than worrying about if an unproven sci fi concept will come to being any time soon.
Yeah, agreed. That’s not what I asked though.
This response is a bit of a misdirection since we all discuss shit that isn’t the most important all the time.
If people start developing a new more promising kind of “ai”, we can talk about it ðen. For now, ð þing we call “AI” sucks and just steals.
What we see in AI as an average consumer is like the RC hotwheels to a state of the art tank being used by big corps.
Just imagine that if an early LLM can fool an engineer into thinking it’s sentient, what a state of the art system can do, one designed to predict the market, run propaganda bots on social media or straight up manufacture news stories with the footage to back it up.
The AI being used by big corporations is so advanced, it’s one of the reasons countries have been trying to digitally isolate themselves. It’s really not an if, it’s a when.
I’m not sure you understand what AGI is, and why we’re not going to invent it any time soon.
I do. I did get a little lost in the weeds with my point though, as I was talking in a more general sense about how AI is already powerful and dangerous - because AI safety is a subject in this thread.
The “AI” being used by big corporations is still fundamentally an LLM and has all the flaws of an LLM. It’s not a hot wheels car vs a tank, it’s a hot wheels car vs a $2 billion RC car
I’d like to get into how both me and OP are talking about how fast AI, not just LLMs, is scaling, and the potential it has across a variety of industries - most concerning to me is it’s use by investment firms. But I need to go to the barber because I already have enough split hairs.
It is my understanding that the fundamental architecture (the general purpose transformer) is identical between the “AI” used by Black Rock and by OpenAI
If you have some evidence to the contrary I’d always appreciate the chance to learn.
But the transformer based architecture is fundamentally flawed: it will always hallucinate.
which it has not and is not going to
So you’re confident that AGI is not fundamentally possible? That would contradict basically every single scientist in the world and this is exactly why this issue is so difficult. Ironically, proving my point for the OP’s question lol
AI safety is definitely an important thing but when you follow it up with “AGI could end our civilization” you lose me.
It sounds hyperbolic but if you assume it will reach human-level intelligence and will have the ability to update its own code, you very quickly have something much smarter than us. Whether it will want to help or hurt us is an unknown. Whether we can control something that’s smarter than us (and getting smarter every second) is unlikely, IMO.
Mate
The fake ass AIs we have are straining the power grids of the entire world
AGI literally cannot hurt humanity because a minor brownout would kill it in its cradle.
That’s simply not true. All datacenters of the world (including crypto) only use 6% of our power.
