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22 hours agoAh, thanks! Well, that’s one lone ray of light.
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Joined 4 days ago
Cake day: September 14th, 2025
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I’m still grouchy about a sandwich place that I liked that recently changed ownership putting in kiosks that apparently do facial recognition, as once I walked up, they suggested items that I’d purchased last time. That started me looking, and I’ve been noticing that a lot of the ordering kiosks that places have been installing around where I am have cameras (though none have been actively making suggestions). I can only imagine that that gets hooked into the tracking and advertising system at some point too, though.
Between increasing use of facial recognition and ALPRs, it’s going to be increasingly difficult to avoid targeted ads. I don’t have a fix for that. I mean, it’s illegal to block use of ALPRs. A lot of places also have anti-masking laws, though I suspect that in practice, they aren’t enforced much, and someone could theoretically put something on their face. I don’t especially want to run around wearing stuff on my face, though.
kagis
It sounds like that was a joke from some years back.
Skyrim: Special Edition Announced For Samsung Smart Refrigerators And Alexa
If that headline has confused you then let’s be very clear, this is a joke by Bethesda…
They do have a screen and Internet connectivity, but I don’t think that ATMs are actually a great route (unless they force people to stop and wait to get their money, which I don’t think will fly and will cut into capacity). There isn’t much eyeball time on them. The reason a car or a refrigerator works is because you’re likely to be around it a lot.
I will say that the rise of gas pumps at gas stations that play back advertisements is pretty obnoxious, though.
To enhance our service and offer additional content to our users, advertisements will be displayed on the Cover Screen for the Weather, Color, and Daily Board themes.
I really hope that Steam games don’t head down this path over time. Internet-connected refrigerators I’m willing to avoid, but that’s not the only vector for this sort of thing.
EDIT: And as has been pointed out on here before, some Internet-connected cars are starting to have updates to show ads on their UIs pushed out. Any time you’ve already spent the money and are kind of locked in and the manufacturer has Internet connectivity to the device and can update the thing subsequent to purchase, you’re kind of in a bad position regarding leverage.
I’d be pretty comfortable saying that buying enough battery storage to power-shift a year of power is more expensive.
What I want to do is find out what the maximum size battery I would need in order to store all of summer’s electricity for use in winter.
I mean, I think that it’s probably not a good idea for this guy to try to go fully off-grid if he has access to the grid, but for the sake of discussion, if one were honestly wanting to try it and one is in the UK, I’d think that one is probably rather better off adding a wind turbine, since some of the time that the sun isn’t shining, the wind is blowing.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/322789/quarterly-wind-speed-average-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/
Wind speed averages in the United Kingdom are generally highest in the first and fourth quarters of each calendar year – the winter months.
The UK is one of the worst places in the world in terms of solar potential:
https://globalsolaratlas.info/
But it’s one of the best in terms of wind potential:
I haven’t blocked anyone on this account, but it’s new.
On my last one, I think I blocked three users. I believe all were basically trying to flood a community so that it was unreadable (one, IIRC, was just posting the same large Simpsons or Futurama image repeatedly throughout a thread to try to stop people from talking).
While I’d personally rather have more users over here producing comments and posts and such, I’d point out that unless something has changed, you can browse Reddit without an account or logging in, from a Web browser. You just can’t post, comment or vote.
Specifically for subreddits flagged as NSFW, Reddit’s “new” Web UI will demand that mobile users install their app, but you can bypass that by using the “old” Web UI.
goes to check to see if that still works
Huh. Actually, there is a change, but not the way I’d expected. It looks like at least where I am, California, now even the new Reddit Web UI lets anonymous users into NSFW subreddits using a mobile web browser, just by clicking on an “I declare that I am 18+” button. That definitely had not been the case. Maybe these countries declaring age restriction laws basically made them review their policy, and some of the changes have actually made it more-permissive, based on geolocation of IP.
e.g.
https://old.reddit.com/r/nsfwcyoa
Now both are accessible. I will bet that that’s not what people in the UK see, though (well, not unless they’re on some sort of VPN with an exit node in a place with different laws).
6·1 day agoJust an occasion glance every like 15 minutes…like a little drip
“Not like those people with a check-every-three-minutes habit that are fiends for the stuff.” :-)
How else do you even find a community to sub to?
Hit lemmyverse.net, or check and see what people you talk to and find interesting are commenting in. Every subscription to a remote community had to start with at least one user on your home instance doing that.
There’s also !communitypromo@lemmy.ca and !newcommunities@lemmy.world (the latter specifically for those communities just starting out) that will have a list of communities actively seeking new users.
I also try to recommend communities that I’ve found interesting when they’re relevant and come up in my comments with the
!communityname@instancesyntax. Lile, the other day someone posted a question about dice on !asklemmy@lemmy.world, and I mentioned !clacksmith@lemmy.world, which is devoted to people making dice (and has pretty pictures of them). That last one obviously relies on people actually sticking those recommendations in their comments though!
Long run, my thinking is that the best approach is to have something like “user curation lists” and let other users subscribe to them. Could be posts, users, communities or whatever. Then you find something that approximates your preferences, subscribe to “Bob’s community whitelist” and/or “Jim’s community blacklist”, and that reduces some of the human-time load to try to identify interesting content. My understanding is that BlueSky has something vaguely along these lines.
But I think that there are probably more-immediate problems on the Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin developer plates right now, like dealing with the scraper-bots that are severely loading all of the instances that permit anonymous access.
In general, I’d suggest browsing by “Subscribed” rather than “All”.
First, “All” doesn’t actually show you everything out there, because your home instance doesn’t know about everything out there. It only shows you communities that at least one user on your home instance (lemmy.cafe, for you) has subscribed to. You’re seeing content from communities on “.moe” TLD instances because at least one user on your home instance is subscribing to those communities. On very large Threadiverse instances, like maybe lemmy.world, with many users, this is closer to seeing everything, since odds are better that someone on your home instance has subscribed to it. But it’s not everything.
But secondly, I’ve seen a number of posts from people who invariably don’t like one type of content or another — yours isn’t one, to be fair — complaining that lemmy defaults should exclude X from the All feed, for some X, because they don’t like X and find it difficult to exclude X. And the problem is that there’s no global X that fits everyone.
The Internet as a whole is a firehose, and invariably, there’s stuff out there that people aren’t going to want to see, and people who are going to create communities that someone doesn’t like. Might be spam or just noise, might be test material, you name it.
If you really want to see everything out there, you’re probably going to want a script anyway. You’re probably going to want to pull down https://lemmyverse.net/communities or something similar — they spider the Threadiverse, and do actually build a list of all communities out there — which actually does list everything out there, then filter by whatever criteria you want, then subscribe to everything left.
EDIT:
on “.moe” TLD instances
Sounds like, from the other comment, that it’s not “.moe” TLD instances that you’re thinking of, but rather communities that end in “moe”. Though in general, if the objection is to sexed-up young anime girls, I expect that it’s most-likely inclusive of both.
Well…
From an evolutionary standpoint, we’re basically the same collection of mostly-hairless primates that, 20,000 years ago, hadn’t yet figured out agriculture and were roaming the land in small groups of maybe 100 or so at most, living off it as best we could.
From that standpoint, I think that we’ve done pretty well with a brain that evolved to deal with a rather different environment and is having to navigate a terribly-confusing, rather different situation.
I mean, you see any other critters that have been outperforming us on improving their understanding of the world?
I recall reading that one application of sentiment analysis in voice recognition — like, determining what a speaker’s mood is — is that if someone gets upset on a call talking to a computer, the system will route them to a human.
I remember reading someone on some service…maybe it was Steam?..saying that some wildly disproportionate percentage of their users had January 1 as their birthday. As in, people didn’t even want to bother setting the month and day, which defaulted to January 1, just cranked the year back to whatever was required to avoid age-restriction hurdles.
Altman said in a statement accompanying the announcement, adding that the company is “building an age-prediction system to estimate age based on how people use ChatGPT.”
I suppose our theoretical teenager could get an account on, say, Grok and ask it to rephrase all of his prompts as if they were written by a 30-year-old and then send the output of that to ChatGPT. Let the models fight it out based on their profiles of what constitutes an adult.
This might be too far into the “watching gameplay” side of things or not up your alley, but I remember watching through some Arma II videos by Jester814 on YouTube and enjoying them.
He was one of a number of members who play in a group that tries to stay in-character, act as if it were a real Marines operation.
The 506th Infantry Regiment Realism Unit was founded in late 2014 by former members of the 15th MEU(SOC) Realism Unit. Many of our members are veterans and active duty military from around the world. The primary focus of the unit is light infantry combat in Arma Reforger utilizing real to life tactics, techniques, protocol, and communication.
While I do like some military history, I’m not really all that interested in light infantry tactics, so the content itself wasn’t an immediate draw…but I wound up finding it fun to watch through the videos.
One of his ArmA II playlists:
He’s also done ArmA III videos, which are obviously graphically-prettier, but at least in the few I watched — and I haven’t gone back and looked recently — he didn’t have larger numbers of coordinating players acting as larger, hierarchical military units, just a squad or maybe a couple of squads, and I didn’t find it as interesting.
That being said, it’s not something like Red vs Blue, which is content scripted purely for the viewer, not the people involved.
EDIT: Actually, I do remember a couple of large-scale ArmA III operations that he did. Just that there was a lot of smaller-scale stuff mixed in. That being said, could have been that when he was recording them, people hadn’t switched to ArmA III yet — it was still a pretty new game then. I should really go back and see what the situation is now.
Not exactly what you’re asking for (specifically episodic) but relevant, and might be that this tweaks someone’s memory if they’re familiar with such a series and it’s listed here:
They made an Internet-connected fridge and didn’t put an NTP client on it?