I just tend to think of it as the further enshittification of life. I’m not even that old and it’s super obvious how poorly most companies are actually run these days, including my own. It’s not that we’re doing more with less, it’s a global reduction in standards and expectations. Issues that used to be solved in a day now bounce between a dozen different departments staffed with either a handful of extremely overworked people, complete newbies, or clueless contractors. AI is just going to further cement the shitty new standard both inside and outside the company.

I’ve always kinda wondered about this. I’m not an audio guy and really can’t tell the difference between most of the standards. That said, I definitely remember tons and tons ‘experts’ telling me that no one can tell the difference between 720p and 1080p TV at typical distance to your couch. And I absolutely could and many of the people I know could. I can also tell the difference between 1080 and 4k, at the same distances.

So I’m curious if there’s just a natural variance in an individual’s ability to hear and audiophiles just have a better than average range that does exceed CD quality?

Similar to this, I can tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps, but not 60 to 120, yet some people swear they can. Which I believe, I just know that I can’t. Seems like these guidelines are probably more averages, rather than hard biological limits.

I still check in to certain niche subreddits that don’t exist on lemmy. Those feel pretty close to how they used to. The other day I took a look at /r/all and… ooof. It’s very apparent quality has completely nosedived. Lemmy /c/all is a much better representation of pre-blackout reddit /r/all right now.

They aren’t the ‘good guy’ but they are one of the few tech companies left that try to make money by selling a product people want to buy. Basically everyone else is just trying to screw people over or sell out to investors as soon as they can.

That’s not good, but it’s the way people understand and think businesses should be run, even though most modern companies no longer work that way.

Even if he doesn’t want to run it, doesn’t mean it has to be sold to another company. It can just keep on being a private company with a new handpicked leader. There’s no upside to selling for Gabe. After he passes however… all bets are off.

Valve is a private company and hasn’t been contaminated by modern, investor focused mindsets. Valve is a company that tries to earn a profit by selling a service people want to pay for. This is becoming increasingly rare with more and more companies focused on investor return rather providing goods and services in exchange for their profits.

I’m most anxious about what happens to valve post-gabe. You can bet there are tons and tons of crappy wall street types just drooling to ruin Steam for the rest of us.

The biggest issue to me is that all music services offer effectively the same access to music. I’m not choosing between Spotify and YouTube music because my favorite artist is on one, but not the other. However we are conditioned to think this is ok when it comes to video. Streaming services never should have been content creators, we should be choosing Netflix vs Hulu based on price, app quality, video quality.

Yeah, probably more of a ‘proceed with caution’ rather than a flat no.

Not that Google doesn’t have it’s problems, but personally I find Microsoft’s actions in regards to bing and bing search to be more abusive of their monopoly than Google. Microsoft is abusing their position as the OS in order to push people into their other products when it isn’t really feasible to switch for most people.

There was this point where VR gaming seemed like an inevitable successor to traditional gaming. It was everywhere and improving rapidly. There were core concerns, but most felt that those could be solved with time. The technology had so much potential.

This is how the current AI solutions feel to me right now. There are a small-ish group of people who find them very useful and use them often. There are a large group of people who are currently on the hype bandwagon, talking about all the potential they hold. But currently they have yet to truly hit mainstream use.

With VR, all that hype and potential seems largely dead. The promised advancements haven’t seemed like enough to take over from traditional games, the fundamental issues haven’t been fixed because they’re too hard or too costly to fix.

I’m still unsure if AI will go this same route, or if it will eventually break into more mainstream. I think probably the most likely route is something like how Siri/Alexa worked out. Some people use voice assistants all the time, others basically never do. They never quite fully delivered on the revolution they promised, but they were useful enough to stick around. That’s how I feel about the current AI approach.

I think long term we’ll get some other approach that will once again kick off the AI hype machine, but the current AI approach is only going to find limited success because it’s going to be really, really hard to get it to a place where you can reasonably trust the output.