Category Archives: News

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Reddit considers search ads, paywalled content for the future

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Can at least one of the tech media outlets just start titling all of these "Reddit considers further enshittification: Part N" and put the details in the subtitle to make it easier to keep track of?
In this photo illustration the Reddit logo seen displayed on

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

Reddit executives discussed plans on Tuesday for making more money from the platform, including showing ads in more places and possibly putting some content behind a paywall.

On Tuesday, Reddit shared its Q2 2024 earnings report (PDF). The company lost $10.1 million during the period, down from Q2 2023’s $41.1 million loss. Reddit has never been profitable, and during its earnings call yesterday, company heads discussed potential and slated plans for monetization.

As expected, selling ads continues to be a priority. Part of the reason Reddit was OK with most third-party Reddit apps closing was that the change was expected to drive people to Reddit’s native website and apps, where the company sells ads. In Q2, Reddit’s ad revenue grew 41 percent year over year (YoY) to $253.1 million, or 90 percent of total revenue ($281.2 million).

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Reddit considers search ads, paywalled content for the future

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Can at least one of the tech media outlets just start titling all of these "Reddit considers further enshittification: Part N" and put the details in the subtitle to make it easier to keep track of?
In this photo illustration the Reddit logo seen displayed on

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

Reddit executives discussed plans on Tuesday for making more money from the platform, including showing ads in more places and possibly putting some content behind a paywall.

On Tuesday, Reddit shared its Q2 2024 earnings report (PDF). The company lost $10.1 million during the period, down from Q2 2023’s $41.1 million loss. Reddit has never been profitable, and during its earnings call yesterday, company heads discussed potential and slated plans for monetization.

As expected, selling ads continues to be a priority. Part of the reason Reddit was OK with most third-party Reddit apps closing was that the change was expected to drive people to Reddit’s native website and apps, where the company sells ads. In Q2, Reddit’s ad revenue grew 41 percent year over year (YoY) to $253.1 million, or 90 percent of total revenue ($281.2 million).

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Microsoft’s internal memo: So Long, Intel (1992) [pdf]

Source: Hacker News

Article note: What a neat artifact! Nathan Myhrvold did some spectacular prognosticating here. The Apple/IBM prediction is _dead on_ up to the point where he didn't foresee that _after_ the collapse of Pink they would just buy a successor platform. Technically he's right that 64bit architectures wouldn't move into the consumer space for a decade, but he dismissed 64-bit extensions to x86 and that's what eventually won as "the" ISA. He failed to predict that Intel would build a superscalar P5 and captures-all-the-RISC-advantages-behind-a-dyanmic-reflow P6 that let them get away with all kinds of bullshit for a decade. He's right that one of the _problems_ that messed things up for the RISC world (for Unix and NT and ...everyone) was that supporting multiple ABIs in a platform is a huge burden. He correctly points out that DEC was in position to do Modern-OS-on-modern-RISC in the mid 80s and blew it so hard that Microsoft got "the guy they spurned" (Dave Culter). He correctly anticipates that and how many-commodity-microprocessor systems would eat the bespoke high end market. He caught that low-end RISC would eat Intel from below. He missed that the great VLIW snowplow would fuck up the whole RISC market then collapse into itself...and somehow Intel would come out on both ends of that, but that story is unbelievable.
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LightBurn Turns Back the Clock, Bails on Linux Users

Source: Hack a Day

Article note: Shame. I'd heard bad things about their Linux support, and prefer open solutions where possible, so I've avoided them. Laserweb is kind of mediocre and architecturally not my preference, but it has worked.

Angry Birds, flash mobs, Russell Brand, fidget spinners. All of these were virtually unavoidable in the previous decade, and yet, like so many popular trends, have now largely faded into obscurity. But in a recent announcement, the developers of LightBurn have brought back a relic of the past that we thought was all but buried along with Harambe — popular software not supporting Linux.

But this isn’t a case of the developers not wanting to bring their software to Linux. LightBurn, the defacto tool for controlling hobbyist laser cutters and engravers, was already multi-platform. Looking forward, however, the developers claim that too much of their time is spent supporting and packaging the software for Linux relative to the size of the user base. In an announcement email sent out to users, they reached even deeper into the mid-2000s bag of excuses, and cited the number of Linux distributions as a further challenge:

The segmentation of Linux distributions complicates these burdens further — we’ve had to provide three separate packages for the versions of Linux we officially support, and still encounter frequent compatibility issues on those distributions (or closely related distributions), to say nothing of the many distributions we have been asked to support.

We’re not sure how much of their time could possibly be taken up by responding to requests for supporting additional distributions (especially when the answer is no), but apparently, it was enough that they finally had to put their foot down — the upcoming 1.7.00 release of LightBurn will be the last to run on Linux.

To really add insult to injury, LightBurn is paid software, with users having to purchase a yearly license after the time-limited demo period. Accordingly, any Linux users who recently purchased a year’s license for the software can ask for a refund. Oh, and if you’re holding out hope that the community can swoop in and take over maintaining the Linux builds, don’t — LightBurn is closed source.

While there are open source projects like LaserWeb that can be used to control these types of machines regardless of what operating system you’re running, losing LightBurn on Linux definitely hurts. While we try not to put our stamp on closed source proprietary software because of situations exactly like this one, we have to admit that LightBurn was a nice tool, especially when compared to the joke software that many of these lasers ship with.

The developers end their notice to Linux users with what seems like a particularly cruel kick while they’re already down:

Rest assured that we will be using the time gained by sunsetting Linux support to redouble our efforts at making better software for laser cutters, and beyond. We hope you will continue to utilize LightBurn on a supported operating system going forward, and we thank you for being a part of the LightBurn community.

So take comfort, Linux users — LightBurn will emerge from this decision better than ever. Unfortunately, you just won’t be able to use it.

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The Future of Science Publishing

Source: Slashdot

Article note: This is essentially: The Gates foundation suggests that authors continue working around the useless, broken, extractive epeen contest run by the publishers by sharing preprints online, and only engage with the publication process enough to get their prestige points for career advancement. It'd be better if there were money going into alternative infrastructure, but this is honestly not an unreasonable position.

A decade ago, the Gates Foundation announced it will cease covering open-access publishing costs for its grantees from 2025. This shift, following a decade of support for free access to research, sparked concerns in the scientific community. Experts fear the move could undermine the open-access model, which aims to make taxpayer-funded studies freely available. The decision also marked a significant change in the foundation's approach to disseminating research findings, potentially impacting global access to critical scientific information. So where do we go from here? From a report: [The Gates Foundation] notes that open access in its current form has resulted in "some unsavory publishing practices," including unchecked pricing from journals and publishers, questionable peer review, and paper mills -- people or organizations that produce fake or subpar papers and sell authorship slots on them. "Last year was a really pivotal year in scholarly publishing since lots of people who were really pushing gold open access for many years are now thinking, 'Oh, what beast have we created?'" says James Butcher, an independent publishing consultant in Liverpool, England, who writes the newsletter Journalology. "It plays into the hands of the big corporates because it's all about scale." Gold OA creates incentives for journals to publish as many papers as possible to make more money. Some publishers, often referred to as gray OA publishers, have been criticized for exploiting the gold OA model to churn out high volumes of low-quality studies. Butcher says that because subscription- based publishers traditionally couldn't increase revenues by publishing more papers, they tended to keep volumes fairly level. In contrast, Johan Rooryck, a French linguistics researcher at Leiden University and a proponent of open access, points to a "very rapid rise" in gold OA journals and papers in the past decade. The Gates Foundation is now suggesting that authors post online preprints of their author-accepted manuscripts -- near-final versions of studies accepted by journals for publication before they are typeset or copyedited -- and then publish in whichever journals they like.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Kids Online Safety Act passes Senate despite concerns it will harm kids

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Ugh. Way too many folks are falling for this heinous shit. Above and beyond the general "Any law motivated on `Won't someone think of the children' is highly suspect" rule this one (1) will compel unnecessary de-anonimzation and PII collection by vendors, which puts everyone at risk (2) is clearly designed to separate at-risk youth from engaging with supportive sections of society under the premise of "anti-grooming," and (3) was actually written by Heritage Foundation ghouls from the "Better dead than qeer" school of child rearing.
Kids Online Safety Act passes Senate despite concerns it will harm kids

Enlarge (credit: Westend61 | Westend61)

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) easily passed the Senate today despite critics' concerns that the bill may risk creating more harm than good for kids and perhaps censor speech for online users of all ages if it's signed into law.

KOSA received broad bipartisan support in the Senate, passing with a 91–3 vote alongside the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Action (COPPA) 2.0. Both laws seek to control how much data can be collected from minors, as well as regulate the platform features that could harm children's mental health.

Only Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Mike Lee (R-Utah) opposed the bills.

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Outsourcing emotion: The horror of Google’s “Dear Sydney” AI ad

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: The vast majority of writing _is_ extremely formular and ingenuine, but the value in doing it is typically in learning how to manipulate (with) the formula. ...and still, deciding to air an ad encouraging children to outsource expressing their (fake) emotions to a chatterbot is some sociopath shit that it's extremely goddamn alarming no one at google though the better of.
Here's an idea: Don't be a deadbeat and do it yourself!

Enlarge / Here's an idea: Don't be a deadbeat and do it yourself! (credit: Google)

If you've watched any Olympics coverage this week, you've likely been confronted with an ad for Google's Gemini AI called "Dear Sydney." In it, a proud father seeks help writing a letter on behalf of his daughter, who is an aspiring runner and superfan of world-record-holding hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone.

"I'm pretty good with words, but this has to be just right," the father intones before asking Gemini to "Help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is..." Gemini dutifully responds with a draft letter in which the LLM tells the runner, on behalf of the daughter, that she wants to be "just like you."

Every time I see this ad, it puts me on edge in a way I've had trouble putting into words (though Gemini itself has some helpful thoughts). As someone who writes words for a living, the idea of outsourcing a writing task to a machine brings up some vocational anxiety. And the idea of someone who's "pretty good with words" doubting his abilities when the writing "has to be just right" sets off alarm bells regarding the superhuman framing of AI capabilities.

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Dear AI Companies, instead of scraping OpenStreetMap, how about a $10k donation?

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Apparently the AI douches are scraping the OSM web frontends via API instead of just ...downloading the dataset. Which is Free. They're doing surreptitious shit like cloaking their UAs and IPs because they know their behavior is generally unacceptable, and in doing so making it expensive for the hosts of free content they're perfectly allowed to download. That they're hoping to make money from without giving anything back.
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Pixel 9’s ‘Add Me’ feature puts you in a group photo even when you’re not there

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: From someone currently wrapping a PhD in computational imaging, doing a lot of image-synthesis work: That is fucked up, creepy, socially dangerous shit. One of my _hard rules_ for the methods I work on is that you never, ever synthesize an apparently natural image using data that wasn't present in the scene, because that is how you build a truth-bending, history-revising propaganda engine that Stalin could only dream of. The "AI" (because I guess we're calling every heuristic/non-deterministic algorithm AI right now until winter sets in again) folks lack of compunctions about that is really a pressing social issue.
A screenshot showing what appears to be the Pixel 9’s Add Me feature
Image: OnLeaks via Android Headlines

While there’s been no shortage of Pixel 9 leaks over the past couple of days, a new ad for the device seems to have leaked in full — and it shows off a new feature that makes sure you aren’t left out of a group photo.

The feature, seemingly called “Add Me,” appears in a leaked ad shared with Android Headlines by OnLeaks. The ad shows someone using a Pixel 9 to take a picture of two friends in front of a van. After snapping a shot, the photographer trades spots with her two friends, allowing her to get a picture in front of the van — only the Pixel’s display shows the phantom-like image of the two friends standing beside her. Her friend snaps a photo, and boom, she appears in the picture as if she were there the entire time.

Judging by...

Continue reading…

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A hash table by any other name

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Huh, the "Someone has proposed a more performant cache-aware hash table for Linux Kernel use" article is _modestly_ interesting, but the discussion in the comments about the history of modified linear hashing and cuckoo hashing (similar ideas), how it shows up historically in GIRLS/Pick and such, calling out some bad analytic practices that are _super common_ in computing research, and discussing *where* these structures are actually used in the kernel and what pitfalls that might generate, are a great read.
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