25 Dec 2024 Search

More stuff to read on the Internet.

Also, Quora Lies: WW2 Arial, Helvetica, Courier; also Times misinformation (More and more wrong answers out there, in easy to find places. Somehow, people will have to change content discovery habits to deal with scam culture and AI slop, but we don’t know how. IMHO the need for user research is greater than ever.)

[What say you, Spock?] My Proposed Terminology to Describe Bypassing Social Media Face ID Age Verification Systems (Interesting premise but are kids going to pick up hacking habits again? Kids back in the early days of the Internet had to hack because IT was rare, expensive, and flaky. But people who developed their Internet habits in the 2000s-2010s had it easy, because stuff was basically working but companies were still in create more value than you capture mode. I suppose kids today will have to learn to hack, not just because of age verification stuff but because companies are in permanent hustle/growth hacking/value extraction mode, so the value available to the default user is less. Hack the consumer surplus?)

Step Right Up: The Chamber of Progress’s Ticketing Chamber of Horrors Fools Nobody (more news from the world of scam culture. Tech industry out of ideas? No problem, take low-reputation petty crimes like ticket scalping and scale them.)

Why Agentic AI Could Be Doomed To Fail, and 3 More AI Predictions for 2025 Accuracy of 75%-90% is state-of-the-art for AI….But if you have three steps of 75-90% accuracy, your ultimate accuracy is around 50%.

Linden Lab has spent $1.3B building Second Life and paid $1.1B to creators And since Linden Lab shares 90% of transactions with creators and only takes a 10% cut, the vast majority of the money generated through trade is paid to the creators themselves.

Classified fighter jet specs leaked on War Thunder – again (Do Wargaming.net players just take the games less seriously? This never seems to happen to the World of… games.)

The Ugly Truth About Spotify Is Finally Revealed Around this same time, I started hearing jazz piano playlists on Spotify that disturbed me. Every track sounded like it was played on the same instrument with the exact same touch and tone. Yet the names of the artists were all different….By total coincidence, Spotify’s profitability started to improve markedly around this time. and The Ghosts in the Machine, by Liz Pelly

Joey Hess: aiming at December The design goal of my 12 kilowatt system is to produce 1 kilowatt of power all day on a cloudy day in midwinter, which allows swapping between major loads (EV charger, hot water heater, etc) on a cloudy day and running everything on a sunny day. So the size of the battery bank doesn’t matter much. Batteries are getting cheaper fast too, but they are a wear item, so it’s better to oversize the solar system and minimize the battery….It costs more to mount solar panels now than the panels are worth.

Enrico Zini: New laptop setup (related: mine came up with fan and power light but no display, got helpful support)