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For the uninformed what’s the deal with scribd?

Scribd are quite annoying. The pitch was "the YouTube for documents" allowing stuff to be posted and shared but they tend to try and get subscription money off you to see anything unlike the likes of YouTube.

Scribd scrapes the web of all the .PDFs that it can find, then gates them behind a paywall and SEOs their way to the top of Google's rankings. That's it, that's all they do. They run a zero value tollbooth with other peoples' IP, taking advantage of users who don't have the search-fu to hunt down the documents themselves.

They should pretty much die in a grease fire.


I have no idea if it’s still true but it used to be the case that you had 3 choices with a Wordpress install and even a couple plugins:

1) Have a part time job updating it and plugins, making sure you weren’t introducing vulns at every step

2) Leave it as is and hope that no vulns are discovered for your particular version or plugin versions

3) Have things auto-update and pray that your plugins don't get sold or compromised and backdoor your site


4) Don't use a stack of plugins, if you must use any keep them as dumb as possible and stick to those with a longstanding reputation.

A basic instance, set to auto-update, installed on a shared webhost where OS/web server updates are someone else's problem is pretty foolproof. A VPS running a long-term distro set to auto update is almost as good.

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That said I personally dropped Wordpress for static site generation years ago because I realized I didn't actually need any of the dynamic features and wasn't using the WYSIWYG editor. Now I write Markdown in to a file in a git repo and then trigger a regeneration whenever I update it.


Sure, that's possible, but so much of the value of Wordpress is in the plugins.

Indeed. The GSA with 10k employees is going to fall apart without the 40k unused winzip licences DOGE so cruelly took away from them in their senseless spree of madness.

That logic is very short term and while comical isn't close to reality.

I hope you live a long and prosper life so you can see the consequences of this presidential term fully unfold.


Yeah but at least a dozen Microsoft employees went on a seemingly scripted blitz on X about how they’re ready to start listening to feedback and…

* checks notes *

Only have copilot shoehorned into most things instead of everything. And some shit about windows developers which isn’t exactly going to fix the glaring issues with the OS itself.


>Yeah but at least a dozen Microsoft employees went on a seemingly scripted blitz on X about how they’re ready to start listening to feedback and…

So what was the purpose of all that telemetry they collected then? Because it doesn't seem to have made the OS like what the users want it to be.


Do you hate the "Ribbon" UI that got forced into everything in Win8+?

That's what telemetry was used for. Every advanced user turned that off when they gave us the option, and now we have every UI on the computer designed for Grandma.


To better target ads.

Data Gnomes

1) collect data

2) ???

3) profit


They literally broke 40yr standard keyboard layouts on laptops by replacing right alt buttons with their bullshit AI button.

Are they going to fix hardware they've already sold? On every OEM?


No need; they could just patch Windows to add the UI to override Win-F26 or whatever their synthetic Fkey was (currently disallowed by their software!).

PowerToys for the rescue!

I almost commented that you can just configure in the settings, but actually the available options don't include Alt. On my Hungarian layout Thinkpad T-14 it replaced the context menu key, not the right-alt, which is luckily the AltGraph key that has a substantial role in Hungarian input method, it cannot be omitted.


It's because of the way companies align their own behavior. "Listening to feedback" is just a good intention but increasing engagement with copilot is a measurable goal. With apologies to George Orwell, imagine an OKR stamping on a human face--forever.

Vancouver did the same thing. Now remaining parking is just filled with luxury vehicles with MSRPs that indicate you could charge $100 an hour and they wouldn’t care.

Nice of the wealthy politicians to get the riffraff off the road so the guy driving a Brabus G-Wagon, Rolls, or 911 Turbo can commute and park in peace. The poors can sit on packed busses with methheads.


“Canada is doing just fine”

Found the federal govt employee or boomer who bought real estate in the 90s


Even people who bought up til like 2015 are doing well. Housing in Canada really imploded 2015-2023 or so. Before that, it was still very frothy, but low rates and high immigration and poor policy around speculation and flipping of homes really turned the whole country tits up re: housing.


What, $600k for a 1 bedroom condo on a busy arterial road doesn't seem reasonable to you!?

/s

The federal housing minister literally 2 days ago stood up in the House of Commons and associated the housing cost catastrophe with the war in Iran that's been happening for a week.

Thankfully prices on that front are slowly declining. Another $200k to go at least before they make any sense.


Im not even Candadian, but are you implying that Canada has mass homelessness?


It does.


7500 books a day… what percentage are AI slop? Half the non-fiction and children’s books I see are clearly just free tier ChatGPT with poorly generated AI imagery.


true, but what percentage a ghost-written fodder?, what percentage are best-sellers milking their fan=base with derivatives of the same slop? It has always been the problem for the reader to sort out the good stuff from the rubbish, it has just gotten a hundred times harder as the bar for writing is now a lot lower. When I meet a new person who I get on with I ask them what are their favourite books and why, it has opened my eyes to some great books I would not otherwise have found, I really wish I had kept a proper book/reading diary so I could pass these on myself, hindsight it great!


Would a PhD student incorporate something into their model that flipped their results from agreeing to disagreeing with the premise that has not only practically become a religion, but forms the foundation for more and more funding flowing into their field each year?

Would they really want to risk being basically excommunicated from their area of research for daring to provide ammo to “climate change deniers”?


This is rather disingenuous. It can be hard to overcome momentum in research, but most researchers would be giddy with excitement if they could show our (extremely disturbing) forecasts regarding climate change are wrong and that things are much rosier than expected.

I also suspect you would find easy funding from existing climate change deniers. There is no shortage of well-heeled folk in that space.

Do you have a chip on your shoulder regarding research? You're begging the question by stating it is conducted in a "practically religious" way. Ask whether that's true before you question the effect it would have on somebody's behaviour.


“The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.”


That's what happens when we collectively stop making optimized, native apps and just go "eh, javascript is good enough for everything" and make everything using electron.

The common complaint in this thread about the 8GB of RAM is "But chrome..." well I think I see the problem then.

That's why I try to support native whenever I can. Even if a web app might do something better, I'd rather pay for a native app from an indie dev when I can than have yet another chrome tab I have to have open all the time.

macOS at least still has somewhat of a native-app first culture and dev base, so I try to support it when I can.


Sam must not be aware of what happened to any business or foreign nation/leader considered outwardly friendly to the first Trump administration when the democrats regained control in 2020.


You’re assuming democrats will ever be allowed to regain control.


If they earnestly believe in fast ASI timelines then political grudges have to be pretty low on OAI's list of worries about 2029.


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