Amazon is known to have sold Echo speakers for cheap or at a loss in the hopes of making money off Alexa later. In 2019, then-Amazon Devices SVP Dave Limp, who exited the company last year, told WSJ: "We don’t have to make money when we sell you the device." WSJ noted that this strategy has applied to other unspecified Amazon devices, too.

People tend to use Alexa for free services, though, like checking the weather or the time, not making big purchases.

"We worried we’ve hired 10,000 people and we’ve built a smart timer,” a former senior employee told the WSJ.

Amazon is now banking on the impending release of a subscription-based gen AI Alexa to finally drive profits. The idea is that people will be willing to pay a recurring fee to use Alexa if it can do more advanced things, like perform multiple commands without the user having to say "Alexa" repeatedly, be more conversational, and manage smart homes more intuitively. Amazon is considering charging $5 to $10 per month for generative AI Alexa, Reuters reported in June.

These are absolutely going to start showing up at protests.

The company making it.

https://www.ghostrobotics.io/about

The first Air National Guard base to get one.

https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3002329/robot-dog-reports-for-duty/

I've come to the conclusion that there must have been deaths. There were global outages at hospitals, 911 services were out among other things.

Yet I have not seen one official report trying to tally up the deaths. I'm trying to look for something but it seems like there is a blackout on the reproting of this aspect of it.

Found a port of a game I like and wanted to check it out but it's Windows 98 and I know Windows 10 has shitty compatibility options that never work. Really don't want to go about setting up a virtual machine if I can get away with it.

two generations of defective CPUs, well played!

the paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07609-4

respecting robots.txt won't last long i suspect

Got an iPhone some months ago because it was cheaper than getting a Pixel or S24 and I hate it.

The apps suck, sideloading sucks ass because of both apple restrictions and the lack of modded apps, browsing sucks because the adblockers suck because the extensions suck, FOSS is pretty much dead of iOS, call spam detection sucks, keyboard sucks.

I never saw an ad on android for the past three years because of how good my setup was with modded apps and Firefox+uBlock but iOS is pure Advertisement Hell.

The OS visuals and responsiveness are better than most android skins but 60Hz is trash as well and 4GB ram means that I can not even open like 3 tabs at once without the others shutting down.

The photo management sucks the most. Any photo I save goes straight to my Camera Roll and has ZERO organization which memes no more epic funny memes are getting saved on my phone anymore.

The integration with Google Photos is also non-existent and images get saved only when I manually sync them and I will never buy iCloud because I hate the locked down apple ecosystem.

Modded apps also suck and nothing is as good as revanced plus the 7 day refresh limit sucks because of course apple wants 99$ per year to have the godlike ability to install your own apps.

Airdrop is maybe the only positive I remember about this. And maybe the battery life which is better than my previous phone's battery.

Have been trying to set it up for hours now. Nothing works.

• Latest version does not seem to have winutils support, and using it causes errors when using some important methods. (EDIT: this is likely wrong, and the winutils stuff that I have should probably be fine.)
• Older versions require to be built with Maven. However, that just gives me a PluginExecutionException.

I need to do this ASAP, preferably within the next 3 hours.

I have nowhere else to ask for help, it seems, especially considering that suspended an account I set up specifically for asking questions after I edited a relevant post.

Highly doubt that anybody will be able to help me.

EDIT2: the issue has, thankfully, been resolved. I was using Python 3.12, and switched to 3.11.8. That made the problem go away.

i should stress that no development has been made to this since last month and the only recent development was the sole contributor suggesting the idea to the official ActivityPub repo last week.

the contributor proposed sending an E2EE message as follows, using PGP keys that are stored with password encryption on the instance's server:

1. It requests the recipents public key
2. If there is a recipent public key, it sends the recipents public key to the sender
3. If there is a recipient public key, it encrypts the message
4. If there is no recipient public key, it will warn the user that this message will send unencrypted and the user can reject sending the message or continue sending the message with encryption.
5. The message is sent to the user

currently, fediverse services just use existing E2EE services (Matrix, XAMPP, etc.) and while the demand isn't big i think it would be really convenient. especially as a part of ActivityPub, E2EE messages would work over different fedi services to any fedi account, as opposed to separate, incompatible implementations maintained by each fedi service.

what do you guys think about this idea? cool or no?

edit: btw if you don't know, "private" messaging on fediverse is equivalent to mentioned-only posting, meaning the instance admins can read them as plaintext. this is why Lemmy has a disclaimer warning that your messages aren't private, has a Matrix account field on your profile to securely message with and why virtually no fedi services have tried implementing E2EE encryption

What's the mindset behind forcing a user to create an account to view the media on a page? For example an artist I like posts their art on Instagram and Twitter but I can't look at it unless I create an account. What's the dumb corporate rationale behind this? I have seen this on so many sites you can't even see what's there without an account? Doesn't it just scare users away? I know it certainly does for me. If I have to log in just to view a page I don't want to view the page.

They reposted posted it on their mastodon account today.

All goo.gl short links will die.

The linked article does his math wrong - the ad revenue per page view is $0.00258, so the profit per page is actually $0.00207.

This will radically accelerate the problem of search results being full of AI-generated spam.

How accurate do you think this blog post is? "Google now defaults to not indexing your content". I quoted the last two sections.

Google Now Defaults to Not Indexing Your Content - Vincent Schmalbach

The New Reality: Selective Indexing

This brings us to the current state of affairs: Google is no longer trying to index the entire web. In fact, it's become extremely selective, refusing to index most content. This isn't about content creators failing to meet some arbitrary standard of quality. Rather, it's a fundamental change in how Google approaches its role as a search engine.

From my experience, Google now seems to operate on a "default to not index" basis. It only includes content in its index when it perceives a genuine need. This decision appears to be based on various factors:

• Extreme content uniqueness: It's not enough to write about something that isn't extensively covered. Google seems to require content to be genuinely novel or fill a significant gap in its index.

• Perceived authority: Sites that Google considers highly authoritative in their niche may have more content indexed, but even then, it's not guaranteed.

• Brand recognition: Well-known brands often see most of their content indexed, while small or unknown bloggers face much stricter selectivity.

• Temporary indexing and de-indexing: In practice, Google often indexes new content quite quickly, likely to avoid missing out on breaking news or important updates. Soon after, Google may de-index the content, and it remains de-indexed thereafter. So getting initially indexed isn't necessarily a sign that Google considers your content valuable.

I've observed this shift firsthand. In the past, when I set up a new domain, it would be indexed within an hour or faster, sometimes in seconds. This was true even for brand new domains with no mentions anywhere and no backlinks. When I searched for the title of one of those brand new blog posts or some unique sentence from the article, it would be right there on the first Google page.

Now, for each piece of content, Google decides if it's worth indexing, and more often than not, the answer seems to be "no." They might index content they perceive as truly unique or on topics that aren't covered at all. But if you write about a topic that Google considers even remotely addressed elsewhere, they likely won't index it. This can happen even if you're a well-respected writer with a substantial readership.

Interestingly, I've noticed that when content does manage to get indexed, it often ranks surprisingly well. It's as if the hurdle of getting indexed has become so high that once you clear it, you're already most of the way to ranking. However, getting to that point has become exponentially more difficult.

Importantly, this extreme selectivity isn't applied equally. Big, recognized brands often see most of their content indexed quickly, while small bloggers or niche websites face a much higher bar for inclusion. For these smaller players, it's not just about creating good content anymore – it's about convincing Google that your content is absolutely necessary for their index.

The Consequences

Google has transformed from a comprehensive search engine into something more akin to an exclusive catalog. For users, it means that the information they're looking for might exist but remain undiscoverable through Google.

I'm sure that a vast amount of valuable content is being overlooked. Information that you might search for may never appear in Google's results. Not because it doesn't exist, but because Google has chosen not to include it. For content creators, it presents a significant challenge: how do you gain visibility if Google refuses to index most of your content?