🥸 well you see, you own a digital license to watch the movie so long as we have it available, have you read our terms of agreement–

Agreed that this is scummy marketing, though. The only real way to own media (legally) anymore is through physical copies, and even then maybe there’s some provision that makes a DVD illegal due to license shenanigans… but no cop’s gonna bust down your door for owning an illegal DVD of Aquaman.

So this is actually an interesting term. Looking it up from Wikipedia…

The term “sideload” was coined in the late 1990s by online storage service i-drive as an alternative means of transferring and storing computer files virtually instead of physically. In 2000, i-drive applied for a trademark on the term. Rather than initiating a traditional file “download” from a website or FTP site to their computer, a user could perform a “sideload” and have the file transferred directly into their personal storage area on the service.

The advent of portable MP3 players in the late 1990s brought sideloading to the masses, even if the term was not widely adopted. Users would download content to their PCs and sideload it to their players.

So as applied to phones it originally meant a particular type of download and install - rather than installing directly to your phone from an app store, you have somehow obtained the file on your PC, transferred the file to your phone, and then installed it. In that context, downloading an APK directly to your phone and installing it would not be sideloading.

However, semantics have shifted somewhat and now it’s used generally to refer to any install that isn’t directly from an app store of some kind, and requires downloading an actual package file and then installing it.

Important context autotldr missed:

The incident happened when the engineer was programming the software that controls the robots, which cut car parts from aluminium, The Information reported.

Two of the robots were disabled, but a third was inadvertently left on. As it went through its normal motions, it caught the worker in its claws.

Yikes, that should be checked multiple times before someone gets close to the clawed aluminum cutting robot. Failure of process, I suspect.

It’s the style right now. Personally, I’m hoping for a “retro beige case that can hold modern hardware” era because I have terrible taste.

I feel like the Fediverse hasn’t yet reached the Eternal September moment, and I’m happy for that. A smaller footprint means we get to have our own culture.

On the other hand, even though it means losing this culture, I would like to see greater general adoption of the fediverse and decentralized social media in general. Sure, there will likely be some big-name domains serving fediverse instances, the same way email is primarily served by Gmail et al, but anyone should be able to spin up their own instance and interact as well. I don’t believe Internet communication should be locked behind various walled gardens, and people should re-acclimatize themselves to a version of the Internet where anyone can host and contribute.

@ISometimesAdmin@the.coolest.zone Let me know if you need rehab.

But seriously… yeah, I get it. Especially this part about the workplace:

Nevertheless, [addicted programmers] can also pose significant risks, especially because they frequently deviate from the planned course. They follow their own agenda, introducing challenges where none were necessary, or dedicating hours to minor, tangential aspects of a project. In the process, they diverge from the project plan, programming what they believe is necessary rather than what the project itself requires.

I have been that person before, and now I’m in a position where I have to keep those folks on a tight leash and remind them “our goal is to deliver a product right now, and we can enhance it in future sprints. Let’s just focus on what our primary goal was right now.” It’s easy to fall down rabbit holes, and that’s where having proper planning and a ticketing system to backlog and prioritize future enhancements is so critical.

Details:

On January 1, 2020, Lowtax changed a setting so that unregistered users could not see the forum index. Anyone not logged in would be given the banpage because of ‘=’ in place of ‘==’ in a section of the code. This led to discovery of an ancient bit of radium code that changed ‘unregistered user’ to a homophobic slur. Jeffrey fixed the bug, but this load bearing slur will live on forever.

While details are scarce at this point, my best assumption as to what happened hinges on the idea that non-logged-in users with a presumed username string value of unregistered user were meant to be forwarded to the login page, but because a separate section of the code changed the string value of unregistered user to [homophobic slur here], hence nobody actually got the correct forwarding and they were all sent by default to the ban page. If I recall, this led to the unintended side effect of non-logged-in users being unable to log in.

@favrion@lemmy.world @KSPAtlas@sopuli.xyz @Klear@lemmy.world

It’s not the same thing, but my immediate thought was Something Awful’s load bearing slur which broke logins when removed.

Ok, so I use Gboard and it doesn’t seem to do that for me, it leaves existing spaces alone. Here are my settings:

Under Text Correction I have enabled:

• Show suggestion strip
• Auto correction
• Auto capitalization
• Double space period
• Proofread

Everything else is disabled, so maybe try toggling things off and on and seeing whether the behavior changes?

I also have two keyboards I switch between: English (US) and हिन्दी . I’m unsure whether having multiple language keyboards changes how the base functionality works.

This is almost certainly totally out of date.

Today, the confusing, intimidating pile of Google Messaging services is bigger than it has ever been, with Google Chat, Google Messages/RCS, Google Voice/Project Fi, and separate messaging services in Photos, Messages, Pay, Assistant, Stadia, Maps, and Phone.

• first three - still around
• Photos - yep
• Messages - duh
• Pay - I couldn’t tell you as moved out of Pay when Wallet rebranded to Pay and then Google inexplicably released a second app called Wallet
• Assistant - I think this technically doesn’t count since you can’t message people
• Stadia - RIP, thoughts and prayers to the five people who used it
• Maps - Took a bit of clicking around to find a business near me that used it, but, yeah. Still there.
• Phone - The most baffling thing on this list. Even ArsTechnica in the article doesn’t know if this is the same service as the above Maps chat or not. I’ve never seen this, so hopefully it was a short lived experiment that never took off… but maybe someone else here has seen it recently?

Welp, never mind, not that out of date.

These clowns want to push a messaging standard. Jump to RCS, Google says. Hey, Google. How about you standardize your shit first. Nearly all of these could be collapsed into a single messaging platform with little integrations into your other services via the Messages app (aka sent as links and displayed as integrations in compatible devices).

It probably won’t make you ill immediately, more likely the texture or flavor would begin to suffer first (hence “best by” rather than “expiration” date). Keeping it stored properly (i.e. not an open bag but something sealed) would likely allow it to last longer.

You should probably not eat 3.5lb of candy within 10 days unless you are trying to make your intestines suffer, but if you choose to binge please update us as to the state of your health so that you may be used as a cautionary tale.

You’re telling me I can meet a potential partner, have video calls with them, get scammed out of money, and tweet about how sad I am, all from the same platform? Sign me up.

Boo, uncool. Shouldn’t have announced it at all if it were that unfeasible.

I realize that letting people outside Tumblr read Tumblr posts means losing ad revenue on new users, but keeping Tumblrites on Tumblr and allowing them to bring in Mastodon/Lemmy/pixelfed posts would keep the existing users more glued to the platform (more ad revenue). I guess they’re gunning for new users primarily.

Let him play in the legacy code. You can just hose him off later before letting him back into the office so he doesn’t track it everywhere.

The matchmaking feature is kind of cute. For some reason I thought Tinder was a hookup app and not a dating app. Has that changed or was I just always misinformed?

Separately, to answer your question… It’s generally been assumed I suppose, if a product is invented and people use it, that means it’s providing some positive impact. Like asbestos did initially.

What this research says is that there are products that make the users’ lives worse, and would be even worse than that if they didn’t because their peers are using the products and they would be left out.

Like, the ideal scenario for happiness might be if Tiktok didn’t exist, but since it does it’s now a choice for school aged kids between “using Tiktok and absorbing harmful messages” and “not using Tiktok and feeling left out and possibly being ostracized by their peers”. The very existence of some products cause usage simply because it’s the least bad option of using/not using.

Asbestos is strong, cheap, has great fire insulation, sound insulation, heating insulation, fire protection, and resistant to water. What a wonderful building material! It wasn’t until later that we discovered the health hazards (or, maybe they were known but it only became widely and publicly known later, I’m not sure).

While I agree in theory, it’s hard practically to give the ability to make private wording and typo edits without giving the ability to make more insidious changes - like pushing a certain narrative and then quietly changing words here and there to erase evidence of that after most people have read it, etc.

If news websites kept their own visible audit trail, much like Wikipedia, I could see the argument that Internet Archive doesn’t need to capture these articles immediately, maybe it should be time bound to a year after publication or somesuch, and therefore recent news could retain its paywall by the NYT without being sidestepped by Internet Archive. (While it’s annoying that articles are paywalled, news sites do need to make money and pay for actual news reporters.)

AI is absolutely taking off. LLMs are taking over various components of frontline support (service desks, tier 1 support). They’re integrated into various systems using langchains to pull your data, knowledge articles, etc, and then respond to you based on that data.

AI is primarily a replacement for workers, like how McDonalds self service ordering kiosks are a replacement for cashiers. Cheaper and more scalable, cutting out more and more entry level (and outsourced) work. But unlike the kiosks, you won’t even see that the “Amazon tech support” you were kicked over to is an LLM instead of a person. You won’t hear that the frontline support tech you called for a product is actually an AI and text to speech model.

There were jokes about the whole Wendy’s drive thru workers being replaced by AI, but I’ve seen this stuff used live. I’ve seen how flawlessly they’ve tuned the AI to respond to someone who makes a mistake while speaking and corrects themself (“I’m going to the Sacramento office – sorry, no, the Folsom office”) or bundles various requests together (“oh while you’re getting me a visitor badge can you also book a visitor cube for me?”). I’ve even seen crazy stuff like “I’m supposed to meet with Mary while I’m there, can you give me her phone number?” and the LLM routes through the phone directory, pulls up the most likely Marys given the caller’s department and the location the user is visiting via prior context, and asks for more information - “I see two Marys here, Mary X who works in Department A and Mary Y who works in Department B, are you talking about either of them?”

It’s already here and it’s as invisible as possible, and that’s the end goal.

Piracy exists because it’s easier than the alternative. Textbooks are expensive as hell and publishers are working to demolish the used book market - first by changing the version every year, and now with one-time-use mandatory software keys. Sites like Libgen wouldn’t have to exist if textbooks were $20 a pop, or if the used book market was allowed to exist. These problems are created by greed.