“Uhg, McDonalds again. These assholes always waste my time with the same ad over and over again. I just want to watch a video. I hate these idiots.”

Yes, the brain registers. If a brand keeps annoying me over and over again with intrusive ads, the breain does register.

They make money for those who sell ad space.

Overall, developing (in open source or not) or creating art or whatever one is into my once advice is to cherry pick whatever strangers are telling you. You only listen to the healthy advice and everything else must be like water off a duck’s back.

This part here.

Only taking healthy advice and ignoring everything else is something you can do if you are super mentally stable. If you aren’t this is often not possible.

In commercial development that’s easy. I don’t really care about the product I am working on. I am doing a good job working on it, but it’s not my baby. Also, I am a developer, so I develop. There’s customer support people who get paid to have customers scream at them.

If this is your personal pet project, that you love and that you poured your soul in, that’s more difficult. Especially if you are already struggling with mental health.

And I don’t like it when we say “only mentally stable people who don’t mind engaging with a toxic community deserve to be FOSS developers”. That’s just not right.

The peanut butter example might be overly simplistic, especially because it compares b2c to b2b, but other than that the original point is actually correct.

In B2B it’s very common to order things before they are manufactured. If a company orders 100 new company cars, it’s very rare that the car dealership (or even the car manufacturer) has all 100 of them on their yard, ready to be taken away.

Especially when you are talking about large-scale b2b purchasing, it’s very common that orders are taken months or even years in advance.

And here we aren’t even talking about regular “my company needs to buy 100 RAM sticks to upgrade the laptops”, but we are talking about manufacturing deals. They always order stuff like RAM chips way in advance, even if only to secure reliable and predictable pricing and availability.

Tbh, without the last three steps, this is how business works in general.

You order parts for devices that don’t exist yet (if they existed, you wouldn’t need to order parts). Same with creating new data centers. You don’t build the data center, and only when it’s all fully finished go shopping around to see if the hardware you want to run is available or not.

Trying to capture mathematically impossible profits and satisfying inexistent demand are the only real points here.

Obligatory damn clankers.

You’re drowning out the potential of your competition. That’s marketing, and if you stop then your competitor takes over or a small business won’t grow.

Tbh, I don’t think it’s that powerful. I’ve been happily googling on DuckDuckGo for years, same as I have been using Post-its from all sorts of companies and in fact never from Post-it. I don’t think this brand is even available in my country.

I’ve been using “Tixo” for “sticky tape” even though the Tixo brand went out of business around the time I was born.

In fact, if a brand name becomes genericised, it loses its power. It stops being a brand and becomes a generic term for anything in that space.

Brand recognition also goes the other way. You know, like when you see a McDonalds and you instinctively go “Ugh, these asshats who keep wasting my time with always the same ad over and over again when I try to watch a youtube video.”

Intrusive ads don’t further positive brand recognition but instead cause brand fatigue.

That’s the neat thing, they don’t.

Marketing looks like it is there to make you buy products, but it’s a well-known fact that this doesn’t work, and online ads specifically allow performance measurements, and they show that it’s not worth the money.

So what are ads actually there for then?

First, remember that the thing that marketing departments are best at is marketing their own importance to company management. They are really good at convincing their companies that if they stop marketing, everything will collapse. So in this way, marketing is there to finance the marketing department, and everyone’s too scared to stop marketing, because if they do they will be seen as the biggest idiots ever.

Second, marketing is there to provide a small revenue stream to the platform where you see the ads, but more importantly to punish you for not paying premium. Youtube makes you watch a shitton of ads, not because they care about whether you buy anything from the ads, but to punish you for not paying premium and to get you to do so. A premium customer brings in orders of magnitude more money than an ad-only customer.

But

Tbh, I think it’s a bit of pick your battles. GOG and Steam are mostly good companies, but it’s all closed source and I would bet money they are using AI to develop too. And they don’t even provide any way that you could check that, because their code isn’t open at all.

Is that really better than some open source dev developing with AI in broad daylight?

I totally understand why the Lutris dev shut down the discussion. The dev posted about struggling with mental health, and developing open source software is sadly really bad for your mental health. There’s just too many people who think that the code is public and thus they get a say in it, even if they didn’t contribute anything at all.

As an open source dev, you contribute without getting anything in return, and then you have to justify your actions in front of random strangers who often get quite aggressive. It’s a really big problem in the FOSS sector. Look up e.g. the controversy around Marcel Bokhorst (M66B). He almost shut down all his great FOSS projects because of all the hassle he got from randos on the internet.

So it begins. We are past the unlimited money stage and now the cuts begin to make AI somewhat profitable.

Expect more of that in the coming months.

And my axe!

Ist es das? Ich hab leider recht viel mit rechten Wählern zu tun und lasse mich wohl zu einfach in Diskussionen mit denen reinziehen.

Eines, was bei ausnahmslos jeder einzelnen Diskussionen mit denen gleich ist, ist dass sie nicht über Lösungen, Lösungsansätze oder selbst über utopische Wunschlösungen reden. Das ist gar nicht Teil ihres Repertoires.

Es geht nur mehr um Schuldige suchen, Neid und den Anderen was wegnehmen. Und dabei tatsächlich inzwischen nicht mal mehr zur Selbstbereicherung.

Wenn man jeden Tag auf einen Migranten spucken dürfte, der mit seiner Zahnbürste die Straße schrubbt, dann wären erschreckend viele von den rechten Wählern mit denen ich rede tatsächlich glücklich, selbst wenn sich an ihrer eigenen Sitation nichts ändert oder die gar schlechter wird.

Es geht nicht mehr um einfache Lösungen, nur mehr auf das Runtertreten auf Leute, die es schlechter haben.

Ein Absturz, von dem die AfD gewonnen hat… Wenn ich die Wahl hab, ob wer FDP oder AfD wählt, dann bin ich mir nicht sicher ob ich es feiern täte, wenn er bei der AfD sein Kreuz macht.

Die FDP sind Schweine, aber wenigstens keine Nazis.

10% ihrer Stimmen weniger, das ist schon nicht schön. Nicht so schlimm wie die 50% der Stimmen der SPÖ, aber trotzdem nicht schön.

If you want to know, I can remove them from your mouth for a few days and return them after.

Only if you are a really bad father.

Zum Glück hast du die 1 ausgeschrieben, sonst hättest du jetzt die Polizei vor der Tür.

There’s a huge difference between “Creates intelligible single-use text that’s good enough that I can understand what the text is roughly about” and “Creates text at a quality high enough to work as a quotable source”.

For the first use case, infrequent hallucinations are no problem. I read it, if I understand a bit about the topic I might catch it, if not it probably doesn’t matter too much either. Especially if it’s about non-critical topics.

For the second use case, infrequent hallucinations are a massive problem. Most people who use Wikipedia use it like a primary source. Even though sources are linked, they don’t go hunting for sources but instead rely that the information in the article is accurate. Every article is read not only once by one person, but thousands or hundreds of thousands of times. That means every single line is read and believed. You can bet that if there’s a hallucination in there, someone will read it and believe it. That’s requires a completely different level of accuracy, and doing that kind of crap translation work on such a large scale as OKA is a massive disservice.

“Just tell it to not make mistakes.”

Yeah, right.