“Top-down mandates to use large language models are crazy,” one employee told Wired. “If the tool were good, we’d all just use it.”

Yep.

Management is often out of touch and full of shit

It’s really hard to get people to suffer mild inconvenience when they don’t emotionally connect with the benefits.

Most of facebook’s evils are remote and impersonal. Seeing your cousin’s baby photos is real and at hand.

One problem is users are selfish idiots. They won’t go somewhere that doesn’t already have a lot of users. They don’t care that going there now moves it closer to having a lot of users, so in a few months it’ll be good and vibrant. Most people can’t even think an hour ahead.

Another problem is that there are many scammers and bad actors. You need to deal with them, and convince your real users that the scammers are dealt with.

Lastly, in this capitalist hellscape everything is expensive. How are you going to run a big service that’s got low latency and high quality?

Yeah, it can be hard, but many things worth doing are hard. If you start with the bare minimum, the other person’s first impression of you is that you half-assed it. Would you be extra interested in someone who’s too half assed to even read your profile?

Put in the hard work. If you don’t have the energy, don’t use the apps. Half-assing it is just going to make you unhappy.

Thinking about my friend group, about half the people met their long term partners on dating apps. The other half is a mix of work and large social groups (eg: people who all go to certain kinds of music festivals)

I guess it varies by age and region.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/20/key-takeaways-on-americans-views-of-and-experiences-with-dating-and-relationships/

While meeting partners through personal networks is still the most common kind of introduction, about one-in-ten partnered adults (12%) say they met their partner online. About a third (32%) of adults who are married, living with a partner or are in a committed relationship say friends and family helped them find their match. Smaller shares say they met through work (18%), through school (17%), online (12%), at a bar or restaurant (8%), at a place of worship (5%) or somewhere else (8%).

Some other sources I’m seeing say it’s as high as 60% of couples met online.

I think dating apps are mostly used for hookups

This isn’t especially true. Maybe Feeld and Tinder are less “serious”, but the idea of dating apps is mainstream enough that you find all sorts of people and goals.

The capitalism and for-profit nature does make them all kind of suck, though

The top of the funnel I could see an argument for not putting a lot of thought in. You’re just trying to get a pool of potential matches. (The apps are cruel for making you pay for this and not just giving you the list up front)

But once you do have a match, you have to put in some effort to stand out. A lot of people get a match and all they write is “hey”, and then they go right into the trash. Why would I engage with someone who just wrote “hey” when I could instead talk to someone who read my profile and said something personalized?

Also swiping yes on everyone might do strange things to their recommendation algorithm. Unfortunately that’s a black box, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that puts you in some sort of chum bucket shadow ban situation.

And also, yeah, making you pay for basic filters is a trashy design. Match group should be broken up.

Most of the apps are trashy and don’t optimize for good matches.

At the same time, many users half-ass using them, or deploy a variety of self-sabotage. (No, it’s not that you’re not tall or hot or whatever. It’s more likely your impersonal message didn’t warrant a response)

These two facts together mean a lot of people have truly bad outcomes.

If there’s any justice, everyone who works for Palantir will be lined up next to everyone who worked for ICE.

I just link people to good posts I find on here.

You’re not going to get a typical apathetic person to change anything.

• Bandcamp
• see who tours together. If you like A and they open for B, you might like B
• indie record labels
• see who’s playing at local venues.

Yep. I’ve been during linux as my main desktop for maybe a year or two now, and it’s been fine. I don’t tinker with it. Most things just work.

The only thing that’s been a little dicey is mods for games, but I think I just need to figure out how like wine and proton prefixes work. It’s probably not hard, I just haven’t had a need lately.

• read Bandcamp’s writeups. Sometimes they do a deep dive into a genre, city, or band. https://daily.bandcamp.com/
• if you find something you like, scroll down and there’s other users who bought it. Peek into their collections
• if you scroll down further on an album, there will be more recommendations
• you can search by genre or tag, too

There’s not to my knowledge a good way to run/test GitHub actions locally. So if I want to verify my change uploads the coverage report after the end of the pipeline, I have to run the whole thing. And then I find an error because on the GitHub runner blah blah is different

I’ve thought about switching. I do like the password saving and syncing between Android and desktop that Firefox does, and I’m not sure if the forks do that.

No regrets on switching to Linux here. Almost all of the time I just use the GUI to launch steam or Firefox. No AI nagging me (aside from whatever nonsense Firefox is up to)

I guess I’m lucky almost no one I know is trying to side hustle slop their way into money. I don’t think I would put up with that happily.

Been pretty happy with Linux for the past year or two.

A few minor problems here and there. I was struggling to figure out how to adjust the screen brightness (pop!_os defaults). Found a command line tool to adjust gamma - my girlfriend was a little baffled. Then I realized I should just adjust the brightness on the display itself, on the hardware.

I just recommend checking things from the live boot environment. I found out once that some things didn’t work (HDMI , Ethernet, Wi-Fi) only after installing, and it was a hassle. Ended up switching to a different distro that did work out of the box.

Microsoft doesn’t have to compete very much. They’re not a monopoly, probably, but a strict definition. Apple exists. Linux exists and is better than the terminal hell the average person thinks about. But that’s not enough pressure to make microsoft actually try to appeal to customers. Most people are basically stuck.

We should break up all of these companies that are so big they can coast with shitty products for years.