…are you serious?

There would be so much data in understanding people’s light usage. For example, you could figure out how late or early people get up, number of people living in a house, how crowded the house is, how many lights are used per room, etc etc. it would be a gold mine of information.

Let’s say you’re a home automaton designer. You want to design devices to be used in the home, but in order to design such devices, you need enough of a stockpile of user data. This lightbulb data would be incredible valuable.

You can probably even analyse the data and determine things like whether someone is watching tv late at night.

From a nefarious view, how valuable would this data be to robbers and thieves?

There was a prophetic podcast episode from the series Plain English a while back that I constantly think about.

In that episode the author describes how the internet is going through a revolution.

Basically 20 years ago, the internet was all about gaining numbers. Companies could operate at a loss if they got people signed up. Facebook, Google, YouTube, Uber, Deliveroo, etc. they were all about getting you in their mailing list or consumer list and who cares what happens then.

Now there’s an issue because that model is not profitable. In order to continue, all the internet is moving towards subscription.

In a sense, I don’t think of that as intrinsically bad. Patreon is a good example. The internet is now filled up with so much shit that people are willing to pay to filter it. So with Patreon, you pay a fee to support an artist to produce the content you want. That itself isn’t a bad idea.

Now that being said, a lot of “bad things” do emerge. The fact that you can no longer buy software like Adobe and it’s all subscription based. That’s shit. But that also inspired software alternatives like Affinity Designer.

Unfortunately here in the UK there has been systematic defunding of things like libraries.

This wasn’t what I read but this looks excellent.

https://archive.org/details/jonah-edwards-presentation

Another super interesting story is about Marion Stokes, who recorded around 71000 cassettes worth of television media from 1975 to 2000s. She houses them in 9 apartments. I need to watch the documentary about her. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes

I remember I started reading about about this when I wondered what kind of media is “safe” for storage. It sounds like a simple question but it’s not. Digital media, unlike print media, is so easy to lose.

I love how so many comments and replies ascribe some form of ‘guilt’ to this, as if HP employees would feel shame. This doesn’t really mean anything to a company that size.

One of the great things about moving to the UK is that, despite all its problems, consumer protection Europe is so much better than in the US.

Sorry, I think you misunderstand that I’m talking about a large scale problem rather than a personal problem. Of course people can individually download videos to preserve.

Imagine losing YouTube’s videos next week. You would have effectively lost nearly two decades worth of media chronicling human and technological development (more if you take into account that YouTube has repositories of older media).

Someone described it like the Library Alexandria. In terms of density of information, I think the comparison is apt.

A good comparison that might be too old for some readers. Back in the 80s and 90s, the early internet was populated via usenet discussions. Google eventually bought this data and merged it into Google Groups. However Google Groups was disbanded. This meant that some archives can no longer be accessed because to do so requires some active component no longer in service. We have effectively lost gigantic chunks of early 90s internet history. A lot of this history was quite important in many facets of life.

There is already something like this via the Wayback Machine (who indeed do copies of video media but more typically VHS and other things) and things like the Russian Library genesis, which is kept in torrent format.

The problem really is that storage for video media is insane compared to storage of document or even photo data.

If people here haven’t read into it, it’s incredibly interesting to look into the way the Internet Archive works. In particular you have to begin to concern yourselves with how long it takes for HDs, SSDs, and other media to degrade in time.

Hmm to be fair with YouTube you don’t think this is now a repository of incredibly valuable resources? If YouTube went down and we lost all videos, we would be losing many important resources, from historical documentaries no longer easily found in media, to guides on woodworking.

It’s a bit scary. Once you remove the crap, it’s an incredibly valuable library resource and time capsule.

I just noticed this.

As others have mentioned the stars have been largely useless in the last little while so to be honest I’m not sure this has any impact. Even sites that try and give a rating based on fake reviews are not helpful because so many reviews are faked. The only helpful part is to try and read negative reviews.

I imagine this star fiasco is something that’s easy for browser plugins to reverse.

I would love to see AI and Machine Learning used to filter out fake reviews. This would actually be useful.

I’m starting to learn about PC building so tagging along here as well (from the UK). Is there a reason why you took a micro atx motherboard with a mid ATX case?

Fantastic work.

Do you think the bot numbers for Reddit will be as bad or worse? Or is there better protection over there?

I haven’t read the replies but there was a very interesting episode by Derek Thomson’s Plain English podcast which I found incredibly interesting.

Derek made the conjecture that we were on a cusp of a big paradigm shift in the Internet.

For the last 20 years, it was essentially about building a consumer basis. So companies like Netflix and Facebook and Amazon did not care about current profits. The point was to just get consumers, drive out the competition, and commandeer the monopoly.

Now and especially post Covid companies like Twitter are realising that this isn’t going to work. The next movement is going to all be about paying models. This is what we’re seeing with Twitter. This is what we’re seeing with OnlyFans or Patreon.

So in light of the above comments, none of this is surprising. The next era will be about paid models of the internet.

I need to find that episode as it was extremely prophetic. It might have potentially been this one https://open.spotify.com/episode/2zRha9y46btKdAfwfHpvQ5?si=_jkP3iX7TXOesHLsoY9Vxw

Can you link an example of what you mean by the problems in image generation models?

It’s just that I fear that realisation may not filter down.

You honestly see it a lot in industry. Companies pay $$$ for things that don’t really produce results. Or what they consider to be “results” changes. There are plenty of examples of lowering standards and lowering quality in virtually every industry. The idea that people will realise the trap of AI and reverse is not something I’m enthusiastic about.

In many ways AI is like pseudoscience. It’s a black box. Things like machine learning don’t tell you “why” it works. It’s just a black box. ChatGPT is just linear regression on language models.

So the claim that “good science” prevails is patently false. We live in the era of progressive scientific education and yet everywhere we go there is distrust in science, scientific method, critical thinking, etc.

Do people really think that the average Joe is going to “wake up” to the limitations of AI? I fear not.

Part of the problem with AI is that it requires significant skill to understand where AI goes wrong.

As a basic example, get a language model like ChatGPT to edit writing. It can go very wrong, removing the wrong words, changing the tone, and making mistakes that an unlearned person does not understand. I’ve had foreign students use AI to write letters or responses and often the tone is all off. That’s one thing but the student doesn’t understand that they’ve written a weird letter. Same goes with grammar checking.

This sets up a dangerous scenario where, to diagnose the results, you need to already have a deep understanding. This is in contrast to non-AI language checkers that are simpler to understand.

Moreover as you can imagine the danger is that the people who are making decisions about hiring and restructuring may not understand this issue.

Wait this image I’ve seen before…when I was a kid? Where is it from?

For a lot of academics, the preservation of knowledge is super fascinating.

That said I don’t think there is anything exceptional about video games in the larger scheme of things. Media, like cassettes and VHS will also suffer from this issue. If you’re a Star Wars fan here’s a random example. There is apparently a stockpile of Star Wars books turned into audiobooks accessible only for the disabled and blind. This stock is stored in some Congress library. That fact always interested me.

The situation for scientific research is similar. A lot of computational work done in the 60s-80s is lost because the media was not backed up or preserved. So thousands of scientific papers are not easily reproducible. I remember looking into a famous paper about climate change models published in the 70s. They recently asked the author if he still had the codes that generated that model and he basically said “heck no”. So all that knowledge is lost. We’ll never have an exact duplication of that important work from the 70s.

Same goes for a lot of the internet in the 90s. Some of it was backed up but a surprising amount is lost. Projects like the Internet Archive are so important for humanity’s preservation of data.

So yeah, the video game situation is interesting but in the grand scheme of things in the early tech era, it’s normal. A lot has been preserved via roms.

How likely is this plugin to break under updates of the Steamdeck? Is it something that’s still very experimental?

It depends what you mean by “breakout product”. Like if you’re looking for revolutionary changes like iPhones, iPods, etc. how many other companies are expected to make generational technology changes?

I mean, the Apple Silicone hardware is pretty effing good.