Skip to Content
tech

tech

20 posts

Posts tagged with tech

šŸ“š You shouldn’t buy a colour e-reader (yet)

Z1NZ0L1N

As long as colour electronic paper is as grainy as Kaleido and as slow as Gallery, you should stick with black-and-white E Ink displays (or go with colour LCD/OLED). If and when colour e-paper improves enough to be worth it, you’ll still have to think long and hard about how and why you’ll use your device, and choose its size and shape accordingly.

This was interesting and informative. I’ve been looking at another e-ink device since my Kindle seemed to go kaput last week. I use it more for reading longer submissions to Foofaraw as I’m all-in on print again, but haven’t figured out what device would work best for that and reading articles.

šŸ¤– Elon Musk’s X Restricts Ability to Create Explicit Images With Grok

NY Times

It’s laughable it took this long.

The FBI and and anyone who has had their image created or depicted in an explicit manner should be going after Elon Musk, X, and use everything within their legal power to identify the people prompting Grok for these images and go after them using revenge porn and deepfake porn laws.

Only California, New York, and Virginia currently have deepfake porn laws on the books, but I’d still go hard after X as co-conspirators on disseminating revenge porn.

šŸ¤– Inside the Creation of Tilly Norwood, the AI Actress Freaking Out Hollywood

WSJ

Over the next six months, Van der Velden toiled with her 15-person team to nail down the look of her leading lady, creating 2,000 iterations of an actress unbound by the limits of physical ability, age or talent.
In recent weeks, she has signed about 60 nondisclosure agreements for hybrid movies (with real actors), full AI films and Tilly-specific projects, most of them in the $10 million to $50 million range.

This is so embarrassing. It took a 15-person team to ā€œnail down the lookā€??? There are thousands (if not millions) of individual artists who can draw a person with any detail and look you desire. And why would someone pay a human actor $5 million when you can pay an AI actor $50 million. What on earth are we doing here???

šŸŽµ Pay per stream is a messy metric

Birchtree

So I’ll ask again, would you rather have had your music listened to by more people and you earned more money, or would you like to have had fewer people listen and make less money?

I’m sorry, but this is nonsense. The whole point of the conversation is to move people off of Spotify and to other places. If more people move to other streamers, those streamers will start paying the artists more… So if an artist had a choice of where they’d prefer people listen to their music, they’d choose the one that pays more per stream every day. This is even before getting into the real ethical issues with Spotify when it comes to how they do business and the actions of their leadership. Plus, if you have only now heard of Qobuz, then it’s clear this isn’t actually a topic you’ve spent much time on or cared about before… (For the record, I use Apple Music because we pay for Apple One as a family.)

šŸ§‘ā€šŸ’» Why Sell Lifetime Plans, in a Default Subscription World?

pketh

When that happens, companies (especially the VC-backed kind) now need to contrive new and increasingly stick-like reasons for customers to pay again. From made-for-marketing ā€˜features’ that suck to use IRL, to breaking compatibility with older versions, to spamming you with marketing notifications and embedded ads. Their relationship with customers goes from symbiotic to parasitic.

Pirijan, the creator of Kinopio, is always incredibly thoughtful with his approach to building and his writing—this is no exception. Longtime readers will know my distaste for where the economy is going with ā€œventure predation,ā€ and the growth-at-all-costs approach in the tech and financial spaces. As Pirijan notes, it all leads to parasitic relationships. Rather than build the best product that users want to use and pay for, they do their best to look flashy, attract new users, and trap them in their ecosystem.