Ah it was Kurzgesagt? Yeah that…really checks out. That dude is sketchy af.

I’ve just gone down a rabbit hole of old Reddit threads. This comment by Brian of Real Engineering is the source for that claim. At the very least, it shows they weren’t interested in putting in effort to grow the platform into the fantastic place it has become since their departure. At worst, Brian’s speculation as to their motives paints them in a very unflattering light.

But it seems it was my mistaken recollection that it was specifically about discussions relating to the “creator-owned” business structure.

You can read further down in that thread for a comment of my own summarising why exactly I described Kurzgesagt as “sketchy af” above. Or for more detail, here’s another thread on the subject where I go back and forth with someone staunchly intent on defending Kurzgesagt despite the overwhelming evidence against him.

I’m pretty sure this is the thread that got me silently banned from all CGP Grey–related subreddits, too. Not a proper ban, but all my comments are silently auto-removed, presumably by Grey’s bot account that mods all his subreddits. I went months cheerfully commenting in Hello Internet (RIP) threads and getting no engagement before I realised I had been banned. Back then I was actually a huge fan of Grey’s in spite of my growing frustrations with some of his content, so that really stung.

Oh and just for fun, here’s another thread I came across with some other people detailing some of the grift-like penny-pinching behaviour from Grey, wherein he treats his audience not as a community but as a resource to be extracted…until it’s no longer useful: https://old.reddit.com/r/JetLagTheGame/comments/1iom4n4/whats_bens_beef_with_cgp_grey/

Without clicking I already know what both of those videos will be.

CGP Grey is a liberal hack. He’s very skilled at explaining things in an entertaining and easy-to-understand way, but he’s really bad at making it clear when what he’s “explaining” is his (or someone else’s) opinion and not an actual fact. And when it is his opinion, far too often it’s a bad one, tainted by some of the laziest liberal status quo bs.

This is one such example, and Shaun’s response is justifiably scathing.

I also found it particularly telling when he did his “guns, germs, and steel” explainer (a book that is widely criticised by historians for its vastly oversimplified explanations), and he responded to criticism by laughing it off, and saying there was no problem. But when he later did a video and made a minor mistake by using the name of a submarine-based missile for what was actually a ground-based missile (or something along those lines), he made a huge deal about how important his integrity is and how he could not possibly live with himself if he allowed that misinformation to go uncorrected.

Suffice it to say, I was not particularly surprised when I later learnt the reason Grey pulled out of Nebula was that he (and Veritasium, IIRC?) wanted a business model/corporate structure which would allow him and other early members to profit off of the work of later-added members. An opinion that put him at odds with the other early founders like Wendover and Real Engineering, who preferred the more equitable model.

Yeah unfortunately Lemmy is really bad with YouTube links. It refuses to grab the title for the suggested title feature. (Though IIRC Piefed also fails on this.) It doesn’t pull any relevant information for the automatic description/summary feature displayed below the post. (Another problem Piefed shares.) And it doesn’t generate a thumbnail. Ever.

On Lemmy, unlike Piefed, you can specify a specific URL as the thumbnail for any post on the submission page. This gives you a way to fix the problem when Lemmy fails to automatically generate a good thumbnail. And unfortunately, when Piefed does a better job at generating thumbnails for its users, it doesn’t federate those over for Lemmy users to see.

omg there’s a site that does it for you? I always pull up the browser inspector to grab the thumbnail URL myself manually, and it’s such a huge pain!

Oh that’s what it was? Neat! I didn’t know. (In case my instance doesn’t give it away, I’m not American.)

I like it cos it lets you browse more sneakily at work.

It’s a 90 minute video. If you can’t read 420 words (nice) in summary of a 90 minute video, the problem isn’t the length of the summary.

That said, the summary does have other problems. Notably: it stops at the fake-out ending at 1:02:41, missing a full third of the video, wherein he starts getting more explicitly political and takes a strong anti-Republican, anti-ICE, anti-mainstream media conformity with the above stance, and explicitly endorses getting involved in politics including voting for Democrats not because they’re good, but because a literal wet towel would be a good option compared to the alternative.

He details Jimmy Carter putting water heating solar panels on the White House, and Reagan taking them down. Compares it to Biden passing the Inflation Reduction Act, which included renewable energy funding, and Trump illegally using an executive order to ignore that. He talks about the erosion of the 1st, 2nd, and 4th amendment rights in America. He quotes an essay critiquing King George prior to America’s independence, and points out the exact same words apply perfectly to Trump, before endorsing getting involved in Democratic primaries and voting Democrat in the mid-terms, and complains about lies like “non-citizens are voting” and “other countries will pay for our tariffs”.

He praises protesters in Minnesota, and endorses getting involved in on-the-ground organising and caring about other people.

Not exactly the same thing, but I used to have a terminal-based Reddit client, back before the API change put a kabush to that. Anyone know if there’s a simple text-based Lemmy or Piefed terminal client?

I also would love to know what the subculture was.

But IMO no, you’re not immature. I think it’s only natural.

Personally, I get sad just hearing stories like this. About subcultures, or communities, or groups, or websites, or games, that people used to love and get joy out of no longer being around because they died or faded away over time. That sense of loss makes me sad even when I had nothing to do with the community.

Oh good tip!

Wtf is this crap? Just because I’m taking the approach of siding with reality I must be a bit or corporate stooge?

Google and Amazon do enough real things wrong without needing to make up bullshit conspiracy theories. Like Amazon’s abusive labour practices, and…everything about the Audible & Kindle platforms. And Google’s support of the American military industrial complex and shoving AI down everyone’s throats while making their products actively worse.

Just because something is bad, doesn’t mean every single accusation against it is accurate.

That’s a pretty righteous set up OP.

Lol not me. I’m not the author. Just saw the article and thought it was an interesting conversation starter.

That might be true, I honestly don’t know. But it doesn’t matter to the point I’m making, which is that however the device does it, it’s the device, locally, that determines whether a wake word has been said, before it starts transmitting what comes next.

No, they can’t. Precisely because of all the people who quite rightly don’t trust Google and Amazon, who would notice their devices’ network traffic increasing.

I’m specifically talking about Amazon Alexa and Google Home devices, not anything else your phone or apps are doing. So the only one of those articles even remotely relevant is the third.

And the third talks about “false wakes” being the cause. Which goes along with what I said before that until it hears the wake word (even if it’s mistaken in doing so), it’s not sending back recordings.

Care to clarify your meaning? Or are you just disagreeing because it feels good to go along with the conspiracy theory?

or a recipe for an insecure mess that could become difficult to maintain

The concept, or the specific setup the author of that article has? If you mean the latter, I’m not going to argue. But the concept? It shouldn’t have any effect either way on security, but the whole advantage of it is that it’s less of a mess. The same way that running a whole bunch of services on bare metal can quickly become a mess compared to VMs or Docker/LX containers, declared state helps give a single source of truth for what all the services you might be running are. It lets you make changes in repeatable and clearly documented ways, so you can never be left wondering “how did I do that before?” if you need to do it again.

If everything you run is a Docker container, there’s a good chance Terraform is overkill; a Kubernetes config will probably do the job. But depending on your setup there are a whole bunch of different tools that might be useful.

What’s your preferred approach to defined state in your home servers?

The data isn’t there. At least not in the way some of the biggest fearmongers talk about it. Everything you say to the device, you can assume is there. But it listens for the wake word locally and doesn’t send information to the server until after it receives the wake word.

It’s funny cos when I was young I recall it being called (at least sometimes) ADD. So the H has been added (or made mandatory in the name) at a time when we’re realising that hyperactivity is not a necessary symptom.