Alex

I just want to buy home automation gadgets that don’t need a bloody cloud account to work.

I think car automation peaked at adaptive cruise control. It’s a simple tractable problem that’s generally well confined and improves the drivers ability to concentrate on other road risks.

It depends what they want to do. They can fork and take on the burden of maintaining the whole tree in which case good luck with that, linux is too much of a fire hose to enable a 3rd party to assemble something similar making different choices about what they merge. Otherwise they can maintain a re-based fork that tracks the Torvalds tree and then congratulations you’ve just invented a feature tree that can do contribution with extra steps.

I don’t think algorithms themselves are to blame but what they are tuned for. While engagement/eyeball hours for the adserver is the prime metric the quality of experience will be subservient to it. If the algorithms could better measure your mood and stimulation levels and maximise for that the effect would be less toxic. Ideally if it realised you were just mindlessly consuming it could suggest maybe you’ve done enough today and to try something else. But that I fear that is not something the owners of the various ecosystems want.

How can Google vet an app store without vetting everything it could serve?

What do people expect? Those servers aren’t free to run and they’re is only so much VC money to burn. That said I wouldn’t pay the various subscription levels that are currently being asked for. I pay for API use which is basically pay as you go. It also makes you think “does this task really need the non-free tier to complete?”.

I assume that is too cover the intelligence officers monitoring the Russian milbloggers.

They won’t directly support it because in their view the Google Play process is a more secure way of verifying they supplied the binaries than is possible of f-droid. If reproducible builds were possible maybe there could be some mechanism to verify a given binary is built from a given commit of the source tree.

When did this change? AIUI creators got a larger cut of YouTube premium views compared to ad share.

Erm…yes? There is obviously a rush to integrate the latest generative AI tools in everything without thinking about the consequences of it’s failure modes.

Isn’t the GPU documented now?

https://docs.broadcom.com/doc/12358545

There are reverse engineered docs as well: https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv

See up-thread: https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/A-Tik-Tok-ing-Timebomb_12.21.23.pdf

From the UK perspective broadcasters have a license to broadcast and are regulated by ofcomm. I thought the FCC had similar oversight of the US broadcasters - for example not being keen on swearing and sex on TV. For UK news programmes there is a requirement to be balanced for example.

I think one difference is Google is a pull system: you query Google and get results. The short form video streams are push mediums. They feed you a stream of content that it thinks you want. They are fundamentally more susceptible to pushing a particular agenda.

The evidence from the reports in the above article certainly looks pretty daming that tiktok is pushing a particular agenda. The comparison to broadcast which often does have licensing requirements is probably apt.

I don’t buy the arguement that this gives cover to repressive regimes to censor more views because frankly they are doing that already.

The man is a legend although I guess he has done prior experience with codecs through ffmpeg.

Yes it does. You can derive the domain from snooping DNS lookups but the URL is part of the encrypted get header.