Edes's recent activity

  1. Comment on The feckless opposition in ~society

    Edes
    Link
    I honestly have no idea what Democrats are supposed to do other than what they're doing right now. Every time I see someone post about what they should be doing it's either something they can't do...

    I honestly have no idea what Democrats are supposed to do other than what they're doing right now. Every time I see someone post about what they should be doing it's either something they can't do or something abstract that they are doing, like "slow them down to a crawl" and "organize". Maybe everyone's media diet only consists of pundits that love shitting on the Democrats, it's the cool and fun thing to do, but maybe anyone who is worried about the future should try helping a bit letting everyone know that every bit of pain that we're feeling is the fault of republicans. Right now the goal should be to let the 200k people that got laid off yesterday know that it's the Republican's fault that they got fired, the goal should be that 0 federal workers vote Republican for the rest of their lives lest they get fired the next time they get a promotion. It makes me real mad that people like Mark Cuban are on bluesky asking Democrats to somehow negotiate with Republicans so the people that got fired get another month of severance instead of just asking the Republicans to consider how many lives are being unjustifiably ruined for what could be offset by a 1% tax. We just need to stop pretending that Republicans are an evil force of nature that's inevitable.

    10 votes
  2. Comment on Honey did nothing wrong in ~tech

    Edes
    Link Parent
    The behavior (barring when they don't find a coupon I guess, and that's debatable based on their wording) is pretty well explained in their website though:...

    The behavior (barring when they don't find a coupon I guess, and that's debatable based on their wording) is pretty well explained in their website though: https://help.joinhoney.com/article/30-how-does-honey-make-money

    Honey makes commissions from our merchant partners. We earn these commissions when a member uses Honey to find available savings or to activate PayPal Rewards. We work with affiliates to help confirm your purchase, so we can get a commission from the merchant.

    What makes Honey unique is that we pass some of our earnings back to our members in the form of PayPal Rewards, our free rewards program. This is a win-win for our members and for us and it’s what allows us to provide a free service (and without selling anyone’s data).

    This isn't a hidden link on their website either, you just go to their homepage > FAQ > how does honey make money?

    I'm not sure how much more transparent honey could be other than just straight up stating that they take money directly from creators in their pitch. Honey is also hardly the first website to use that system too, there's tons of websites that are 20+ years old that gave cashbacks if you gave them the referral link, and nowadays there's a lot of companies that basically turned into a honey clone (rakuten, swag bucks).

    1 vote
  3. Comment on Honey did nothing wrong in ~tech

    Edes
    Link Parent
    A big part of the degeneration of the internet comes from Amazon's affiliate links, every single review blog and lots of review channels on Youtube have links to the product they're reviewing on...

    A big part of the degeneration of the internet comes from Amazon's affiliate links, every single review blog and lots of review channels on Youtube have links to the product they're reviewing on Amazon, this creates a conflict of interest, they earn money if they buy the product they're reviewing. If there's a better alternative to a product they're promoting but they're not on Amazon there's an incentive to not mention it, because they won't earn a commission on that.

    6 votes
  4. Comment on Honey did nothing wrong in ~tech

    Edes
    Link Parent
    I don't see legal eagle setting up a class action to sue Yotta bank for falsely claiming they were insured.

    I don't see legal eagle setting up a class action to sue Yotta bank for falsely claiming they were insured.

    1 vote
  5. Comment on Honey did nothing wrong in ~tech

    Edes
    Link Parent
    The huge show of force is all the youtubers making videos about the topic and telling viewers about it. The creator of the video was bragging that honey lost 3 million users over this, for example.

    The huge show of force is all the youtubers making videos about the topic and telling viewers about it. The creator of the video was bragging that honey lost 3 million users over this, for example.

  6. Comment on Honey did nothing wrong in ~tech

    Edes
    Link Parent
    What irks me is that these big channels couldn't even do their due diligence to check if a product they were promoting wasn't scamming THEM, and when they realized how it actually worked they...

    What irks me is that these big channels couldn't even do their due diligence to check if a product they were promoting wasn't scamming THEM, and when they realized how it actually worked they chose to make this huge show of force that they have never done for literally every other scam they have promoted. It feels really icky to me.

    1 vote
  7. Comment on Honey did nothing wrong in ~tech

    Edes
    Link Parent
    Honey also works as a price tracking tool, it notifies you if Amazon is hosting a fake sale, if the price went up recently or if there's a big retailer that has the item for a lower price. Amazon...

    Honey also works as a price tracking tool, it notifies you if Amazon is hosting a fake sale, if the price went up recently or if there's a big retailer that has the item for a lower price. Amazon might not have liked that happening.

    2 votes
  8. Comment on Honey did nothing wrong in ~tech

    Edes
    Link Parent
    I'd challenge that, actually, a lot of youtubers link affiliate codes in their description without addressing it directly. Linus tech tips is probably the biggest channel that's guilty of that....

    If you click an affiliate link of a creator, you obviously deliberately want to help that creator.

    I'd challenge that, actually, a lot of youtubers link affiliate codes in their description without addressing it directly. Linus tech tips is probably the biggest channel that's guilty of that. They put amazon links on every of their videos and poach the commissions from anything that you buy for a few days.

    2 votes
  9. Comment on AI music generator Suno admits it was trained on ‘essentially all music files on the internet’ in ~tech

    Edes
    Link Parent
    Yeah, a lot of people don't realize that in a future where AI can replace artists, the big conglomerates already have the rights to enough high quality photographs (stock image companies), text...

    Yeah, a lot of people don't realize that in a future where AI can replace artists, the big conglomerates already have the rights to enough high quality photographs (stock image companies), text (publishers), music (music labels), drawings (Disney and friends), etc saved up in their vaults to create competent models. The other day I read a paper of how a team recreated Google's BERT using one GPU trained for a week by using a higher quality text dataset, as it turns out you don't need web scale data but rather good quality data. This means that if AI is able to replace people then only big companies will be able to afford doing so and the only question left is how the split is gonna go between the people that execute the tech and the people that owns the rights.

    9 votes
  10. Comment on /r/nixos enables automated moderation with Watchdog in ~tech

    Edes
    Link Parent
    NixOS recently had some issues with governance with respect to their volunteers, I'm not entirely sure which side ended up winning (there was some back and forth) but I think they're just weary in...

    NixOS recently had some issues with governance with respect to their volunteers, I'm not entirely sure which side ended up winning (there was some back and forth) but I think they're just weary in general about another coup happening.

    3 votes
  11. Comment on IVF alone can’t save us from a looming fertility crisis in ~health

    Edes
    Link Parent
    It's not an issue to you, it's an issue to people who want to retire at 60, 65, etc. Their retirement funds/assets/etc won't keep up with the costs of what they need to live. The short of it is...

    It's not an issue to you, it's an issue to people who want to retire at 60, 65, etc. Their retirement funds/assets/etc won't keep up with the costs of what they need to live. The short of it is that unless we get to a post scarcity society where old people can function without anyone taking care of them, then end of life care will be unaffordable unless they work for a longer period of their life.

  12. Comment on IVF alone can’t save us from a looming fertility crisis in ~health

    Edes
    Link Parent
    The inflation doesn't come from taking money from billionaires, it comes from not having enough people to work on what needs to be done. Raising wages in the assisted living industry means that...

    The inflation doesn't come from taking money from billionaires, it comes from not having enough people to work on what needs to be done. Raising wages in the assisted living industry means that people will leave from other industries (let's say, teachers) which requires them to raise salaries to cover their vacancies and so on. This inflation isn't bad for most people who work for a living, but it's bad for people who hold assets, usually when this happens governments tend to curb it asap because it could leave retired people who planned their retirement until a certain age with a certain amount of money short, who tend to be the people who vote. We experienced some of this kind of inflation in the last few years, but the fed raised interest rates to stop this from happening, and so the stock market and housing market went up again.

    On another note, the money taken from billionaires is being used for "innovation" by investing it into the stock market or other ventures, hoping to build new things that bring value to people. Even if you're skeptical about that and think we should expropriate money from billionaires, that money could be going elsewhere, like infrastructure or education, it goes back to my last point, where I'm wondering why we keep trying to prop up retirement at such young ages, it's unsustainable and greatly taxes the youth.

    5 votes
  13. Comment on IVF alone can’t save us from a looming fertility crisis in ~health

    Edes
    Link Parent
    I mean the answer is incredibly unpopular and people won't like it, but in a society without enough labor to sustain an old population which doesn't work the solution is to have them work in...
    • Exemplary

    I mean the answer is incredibly unpopular and people won't like it, but in a society without enough labor to sustain an old population which doesn't work the solution is to have them work in whatever way they can. You can tax billionaires and companies all you want, if there isn't enough labor to produce for the retired cohort, the market will correct by raising wages until people working on other things start serving the needs of retired people, the result of this is inflation. We have mostly managed to avoid inflation by passing legislation that pushes these wages down by encouraging companies to become conglomerates, which boosts the value of stocks, where a lot of retirement money is, or they zone properties to restrict the amount of real estate that can be built so people can retire, etc. It's gotten to a point where every time I see some sort of new economic policy my first question is whether or not this is just another scheme to prop up the idea of retirement, and it always is.

    12 votes
  14. Comment on House passes bill that could ban TikTok in the US, sending it to the Senate in ~tech

    Edes
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    I think it's fair to ban Chinese apps as long as China bans our apps. There is a political and economic reason why China bans American tech.

    I think it's fair to ban Chinese apps as long as China bans our apps. There is a political and economic reason why China bans American tech.

    7 votes
  15. Comment on No more freebies: Companies crack down on customer perks and rewards in ~finance

    Edes
    Link Parent
    Inflation exists, so it isn't impossible for profits to grow forever. If your company isn't making record breaking profits every quarter, you would, in fact, be falling behind.

    Inflation exists, so it isn't impossible for profits to grow forever. If your company isn't making record breaking profits every quarter, you would, in fact, be falling behind.

    3 votes
  16. Comment on <deleted topic> in ~tech

    Edes
    Link Parent
    Also horrible SEO for the name, I have been searching for opinions on the matter on different websites (including twitter) and it's incredibly hard to find results on any search box.

    Also horrible SEO for the name, I have been searching for opinions on the matter on different websites (including twitter) and it's incredibly hard to find results on any search box.

    16 votes
  17. Comment on ChatGPT can be broken by entering these strange words, and nobody is sure why in ~tech

    Edes
    Link Parent
    It's using tokens that are extremely out of distribution, sometimes untrained. It's like if someone discovered a way to look at a new color that has never been perceived and your brain wasn't...

    It's using tokens that are extremely out of distribution, sometimes untrained. It's like if someone discovered a way to look at a new color that has never been perceived and your brain wasn't wired to process it, thus the pathways would be essentially random and would cause a seizure.

    4 votes
  18. Comment on Fear, loathing, and excitement as Threads adopts open standard used by Mastodon in ~tech

    Edes
    Link Parent
    All the data is public, if any big tech company wants to mine fediverse data they can just create a fake server and just request it, on the other hand, the fediverse is getting all the data from...

    All the data is public, if any big tech company wants to mine fediverse data they can just create a fake server and just request it, on the other hand, the fediverse is getting all the data from threads for free, it's a clearly imbalanced trade. You'll be able to essentially browse through threads with your own client that doesn't track every click you make all aggregated through your instance. You get all the content and Facebook doesn't get your location data.

    32 votes
  19. Comment on Fear, loathing, and excitement as Threads adopts open standard used by Mastodon in ~tech

    Edes
    Link
    What's the point of federation if the biggest chunk of admins choose to recursively defederate with anything that threatens your status as the admins of the biggest instances? Surely this is seen...

    What's the point of federation if the biggest chunk of admins choose to recursively defederate with anything that threatens your status as the admins of the biggest instances? Surely this is seen as a cynical way to defend their status of being the biggest admins who can set the rules, as I don't believe that meta's moderation will be lacking

    25 votes
  20. Comment on r/Place on Reddit returns tomorrow in ~tech

    Edes
    Link Parent
    Honestly since the second time they ran it multiple other websites have tried to make clones of it, i.e. specific twitch streamers. Honestly it's just cheap and boring, I don't know what changed...

    Honestly since the second time they ran it multiple other websites have tried to make clones of it, i.e. specific twitch streamers. Honestly it's just cheap and boring, I don't know what changed in the last 5 years or even the last year, but I don't want to spend my time making a collaborative art piece if they want to use it to advertise.

    I guess back when anyone could get the data and create things themselves the relationship felt like a community rather than unpaid labor?

    6 votes