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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • I doubt he’d ever do anything really bad, but I know if they did break up my sister would hold a grudge(she’s a great person but takes breakups pretty hard.), and it would certainly make things extremely awkward between us, at least for awhile.

    I’m just glad that so far there’s no indication that they will get to that point. They are pretty good at communicating with each other and they already have a system in place that keeps finances from being a point of contention between them, so the most common causes of a divorce shouldn’t be an issue short of something drastic happening, like my sister or him developing a disability that keeps either of them from being able to work.

    It’s just concerning for me because my entire social circle was basically formed thanks to their relationship. Every other friend that I am not quite as close to I met through them and they are closer to him and they are with me, and I know at least a few would sever connections the minute they got divorced as a show of support for him, even if he asked them not to, which knowing him he absolutely wouldn’t want them to.




  • Personalities of models. Lol, that is some niche market my dude. Never watched a porn a said to myself “wow, I really like her personality”. It’s just smut to beat my meat to, nothing more, nothing less.

    That’s the thing though paid porn is niche to begin with, and for people that pay for it there are three groups. Group 1 that cares about production quality, group 2 that has some hyper-niche fetish, and group 3 that wants more than just something to best their meat to, they are looking for a sexual parasocial relationship.

    Your future of ai porn of anything and everyone could only address group 2. Group 1 will take quite some time before they are satisfied with generated porn (it would need to be indistinguishable from real 4k porn with high production values.) and group 3 would require the computational power to render it in real time with both a believable personality and high quality graphics.


  • I was a young child during the napster days, and by the time my parents had anything better than dial-up iTunes had already taken off.

    Maybe I’m less into music than most people, maybe most are music enthusiasts who actually take full advantage of all the music, all the time, for a low monthly rate thing but i mostly listen to the same small handful of artists with only the occasional breakout towards newer things. If Spotify and YouTube Music were both to die all I’d have to do is spend a larger amount upfront but then I’d be back to pretty much the status quo, and without the monthly bill. So for me any sort of significant changes in price or quality of service completely negate the sole reason I bother with music streaming and that is convenience and cost.



  • GeekyNerdyNerd@sh.itjust.workstoTechnology@lemmy.worldSpotify re-invented the radio
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    1 year ago

    I mean, this is a nice sentiment in the abstract, but in actuality, we kind of are if we want the product to continue to exist

    Except what made the product attractive to the consumer are the very things making it unprofitable. Minimal ads, unlimited streaming of any and all music you want. Without that might as well stick to terrestrial radio, at least that doesn’t use up your mobile data.

    What I genuinely don’t understand is how you can simultaneously say that Spotify shouldn’t exist if it’s not economically viable, and at the same time, you’ll also criticize them for any attempt to make it economically viable. If Spotify shouldn’t offer the free tier because it’s not viable, and you’ll also attack them if they stopped offering it, what do you actually want them to do?

    The point you dismissed as a “nice sentiment in abstract” applies here: it’s completely irrelevant to the consumer. If Spotify dies we will just go to Apple/Amazon/Youtube Music, and if they all die that’s then iTunes and MP3s get to make a comeback.

    Spotify’s profitability is Spotify’s problem, no-one else’s.



  • Another thing that would help would be banning shorting stocks. Shorting makes it more profitable for investors to take a stable, profitable company that isn’t experiencing exponential growth and intentionally run it into the ground than it would be to simply let it generate long term revenues.

    It’s obscene that we haven’t banned it and acts like it writ large. It simply shouldn’t be legal to sell somebody else’s property that they’ve loaned to you with the intention of buying another one once the price drops. It provides absolutely no value to society, is incredibly risky, and creates perverse market incentives where economic recessions and market crashes can be more profitable for some than the good times.



  • Except for the fact that they aren’t replacing keywords on the user end, simply matching advertiser keywords to a broader range of keywords specifically for the ad results.

    Claiming they are replacing user keywords for higher value ones is absolutely incorrect, which is what the article they got that info from specifically claimed before it was retracted.

    They aren’t taking watch searches and showing only luxury brand results, they are taking luxury watch searches and showing generic ads for “watches” alongside the relevant search results through the normal Algorithm which ties to find what it thinks is most relevant to those keywords.

    That latter one is something all search engines do and without doing so they wouldn’t be very useful to the average person who doesn’t know about search operators and advanced search refining tools… Simple keyword matching is too easily tricked by the SEO industry.


  • but google is editing your queries without your knowledge, so they can milk more money out of their advertisers.

    That came from a wired article which was quietly retracted because the author had misunderstood a slide from the Google anti trust trial and had the meaning nearly backwards.

    What Google is actually doing is allowing advertisers to match keywords to common synonyms and other relevant keywords. If you search for (insert brandname) infant sleepwear for example Google will also show ads from adverts from companies who selected the keywords “baby pajamas”. And that specific keyword replacement was only relevant to advertising"…

    Google has long been transparent about the fact they interpret the meaning of keywords for searches to try to improve their relevance, and if you think about it if Google was replacing low value keywords with higher value ones it would be obvious, as generic searches would only turn up stuff from luxury brands and ads wouldn’t have broad keyword matching.

    There are plenty of things to blame Google for, the low return on advertising that publishers get and the increasing need for the entire Internet to be locked behind millions of different paywalls, SEO optimization, click bait bullshit, link farms, but one of them isn’t replacing keywords to maximize value.


  • Personally I’d say they have some responsibility because they sided with the far right nutters to oust the previous one. If it weren’t for literally the entire Democratic caucus joining in with the 8 lone Republicans who wanted this there wouldn’t be a leadership crisis in the midst of an impending government shutdown.

    Sure, it’s the Republicans fault for even opening the door for a single dude to initiate the process, but the Democrats didn’t have to help aim the sledgehammer in such a way that the ability for the house to function would go from barely working to completely broken till the next election occurs.

    This is the kind of scummy tactics Democrats normally pride themselves as being above.