I think yesterday was one of the most depressing tech support sessions I ever had.
The topic doesn't actually matter much but the absolute lack of basics was just crushing. And I had to do all that over the PHONE! :neofox_cry_loud:
Operating System: Windows 7
Right clicking: ❌
Opening File Explorer: ❌
Returning to the desktop: ❌
Pressing any kind of button combination: ❌
Using the Start-Menu: ❌
I'm not even joking! I spent almost an hour alone trying to explain to them how to open their USB stick to check for a file Dx
"I deleted keys generated by our TV for 5 straight minutes. 5 Minutes of like 200BPM clicking. I restarted. Everything worked again. I laughed so hard I cried. I felt like I'd solved a murder."
#Bluesky wants to attract as many non-English-speaking racist accounts as possible. No longer even trying to hide it. The only difference between Bluesky and #Twitter is that Bluesky wants you to select algorithms to avoid seeing racist content, which is the equivalent of staying at a hotel that's hosting a KKK convention, and, rather than kicking the KKK out, the hotel staff ask you to wear earplugs and eyeshades/blindfolds instead. #Mastodon#Fediverse#Tech#Politics#News#SocialMedia#Media
“The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. At 200 terawatt hours annually, data centers collectively devour more energy than some nation-states.”
In an age of LLMs, is it time to reconsider human-edited web directories?
Back in the early-to-mid '90s, one of the main ways of finding anything on the web was to browse through a web directory.
These directories generally had a list of categories on their front page. News/Sport/Entertainment/Arts/Technology/Fashion/etc.
Each of those categories had subcategories, and sub-subcategories that you clicked through until you got to a list of websites. These lists were maintained by actual humans.
Typically, these directories also had a limited web search that would crawl through the pages of websites listed in the directory.
Lycos, Excite, and of course Yahoo all offered web directories of this sort.
(EDIT: I initially also mentioned AltaVista. It did offer a web directory by the late '90s, but this was something it tacked on much later.)
By the late '90s, the standard narrative goes, the web got too big to index websites manually.
Google promised the world its algorithms would weed out the spam automatically.
And for a time, it worked.
But then SEO and SEM became a multi-billion-dollar industry. The spambots proliferated. Google itself began promoting its own content and advertisers above search results.
And now with LLMs, the industrial-scale spamming of the web is likely to grow exponentially.
My question is, if a lot of the web is turning to crap, do we even want to search the entire web anymore?
Do we really want to search every single website on the web?
Or just those that aren't filled with LLM-generated SEO spam?
Or just those that don't feature 200 tracking scripts, and passive-aggressive privacy warnings, and paywalls, and popovers, and newsletters, and increasingly obnoxious banner ads, and dark patterns to prevent you cancelling your "free trial" subscription?
At some point, does it become more desirable to go back to search engines that only crawl pages on human-curated lists of trustworthy, quality websites?
And is it time to begin considering what a modern version of those early web directories might look like?
The thing about #tech#layoffs that people who haven’t been through it often don’t understand is that morale never recovers. The employees who remain will never have the same relationship with that company, bosses or peers.
Watching people you respect pack their stuff and crying on the phone with their spouses is something that never goes away. When I survived a layoff in my 20s I became a “do exactly what the ticket says” person. I stopped suggesting ideas, providing feedback, believing anything a manager told me.
If you are a company considering layoffs, especially a profitable company, you should approach it as “this department will have 100% turnover”. The second I got another job offer I left that company and six months later nobody who had been there at the time of layoffs remained.
"Hey, bud. Want to see what this cool thing called Linux can do?"
Here's a drawing of Xenia, the Linux fox we all know and love! Originally a proposed alternative to Tux before Linux had a mascot in the 1990s, she is now an unofficial symbol of unity amongst the Linux and wider libre-software community. It's cool to see not only a mascot to a cool, ethical project, but one that represents the people and community behind it. Plus, she represents the often underappreciated trans community in the tech space, which has helped contribute to the technological progress we see today.