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dan

@ dan @upvote.au

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3 yr. ago

Aussie living in the San Francisco Bay Area.Coding since 1998..NET Foundation member. C# fan https://d.sb/Mastodon: @dan@d.sb

  • ISPs say their “excellent customer service” is why users don’t switch providers

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  • Depends on where you live. In the USA, I've got one cable (coax) option and three fiber options. My area has overhead power + utility cables rather than underground, so it was easy for ISPs to run extra fiber lines. In Australia, there's one network (the NBN - National Broadband Network) that the ISPs resell.

  • ISPs say their “excellent customer service” is why users don’t switch providers

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  • And "we are experiencing higher than average call volumes. Please continue to hold". Every single time you call. That's not how averages work!

  • ISPs say their “excellent customer service” is why users don’t switch providers

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  • Sure... You probably have the option of a wireless ISP that provides 1/10 the speed for 5x the cost.

    In reality... no.

    I used to live in an apartment that had an exclusivity deal with Xfinity/Comcast. We could only get Xfinity services. At my current house I do actually have a choice: Xfinity (cable or fiber), AT&T Fiber, or a local ISP (Sonic) that's much better.

  • ISPs say their “excellent customer service” is why users don’t switch providers

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  • That's true for the larger ISPs, but the smaller ones can be a lot better. I use a small ISP and their prices are far better than the big ISPs, plus their support is really good. Some cities have municipal fiber internet (where the city runs it) which is usually great as the city's motivation is to provide a good service to residents rather than to make money off of it.

  • ISPs say their “excellent customer service” is why users don’t switch providers

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  • I don't mean to make you feel bad but in my area in the USA I get 10Gbps symmetric for $40/month, through an ISP that has awesome support, provides a /56 IPv6 range to each customer, lets you use your own router, and is publicly pro net neutrality.

  • Ken Burns is in your future

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  • X's Objection to the Onion Buying InfoWars Is a Reminder You Do Not Own Your Social Media Accounts

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  • That's like saying "You haven't been stabbed, so you saying people go to jail for getting stabbed is noncense with no truth to it".. Just because I haven't had it happen to me doesn't mean I don't know what the law is. Companies that operate in Australia have to comply with Australian law.

  • X's Objection to the Onion Buying InfoWars Is a Reminder You Do Not Own Your Social Media Accounts

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  • Not sure - don't think I know anyone in Australia who has had their Steam account cancelled.

  • X's Objection to the Onion Buying InfoWars Is a Reminder You Do Not Own Your Social Media Accounts

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  • In Australia at least, if you buy a product or service but can't use it in the intended way, that's considered a "major failure" and they'd need to provide a refund. Not sure how well it'd apply for games you've had for a very long time though.

  • Thanksgiving Dinner

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  • I still haven't looked into what "woke" actually means, but from what I can tell, it seems to mean anything far-right people don't like.

  • X's Objection to the Onion Buying InfoWars Is a Reminder You Do Not Own Your Social Media Accounts

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  • If valve cancel your steam account, you lose your games and they owe you a big fat zero.

    That really depends on how good the consumer protection laws are in your jurisdiction. Not every country is as bad as the USA in terms of consumer protection... Some countries have laws that priorize people over corporations.

  • ‘Thirsty’ ChatGPT uses four times more water than previously thought

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  • I like that the 140Wh is the part you decided to question, not the "consumes 1 x 500ml bottle of water"

  • ‘Thirsty’ ChatGPT uses four times more water than previously thought

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  • Why do people need an app for wallpapers? Just find some nice photos on Flickr, DeviantArt, whatever, save them all to a folder, and configure the OS to change it once per week.

    Reminds me of the "free smileys" and "free mouse cursors" apps from the 2000s. I thought we had evolved past that.

  • A funeral for voicemail - The Oatmeal

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  • Twilio's TTS isn't as good as ElevenLabs, and their transcription isn't as good as AssemblyAI. AssemblyAI can pull key details out of the message (eg people's names, company names, callback numbers, etc) and IIRC it's quite a bit cheaper than Twilio's transcription. AssemblyAI provide $50 free credit to try their service, which should last me a very long time assuming it doesn't expire.

    Plus now I can put "AI engineer" on my resume, lol. A lot of "AI" is all about gluing other people's work together, and that's exactly what I'm doing.

  • A funeral for voicemail - The Oatmeal

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  • Voicemail's definitely not dead.

    I can't find any voicemail services that work the way I want them to though, so I started building my own using Twilio to handle the incoming phone call + ElevenLabs for text-to-speech + AssemblyAI for speech-to-text + Trestle Smart CNAM API for identifying the caller. I'll open-source the code once it's ready.

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  • I didn't say I like centralized sites though. Web 2.0 didn't necessarily bring centralized sites; it brought user contributions and user-to-user communication. Forums and wikis were big for example. It also popularized interoperability with things like RSS and Atom.

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  • I don't know much about AI models, but that's still more than other vendors are giving away, right? Especially "Open"AI. A lot of people just care if they can use the model for free.

    How useful would the training data be? Training of the largest Llama model was done on a cluster of over 100,000 Nvidia H100s so I'm not sure how many people would want to repeat that.

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  • Web 2.0 was good though. It signified the change from the "original" web mostly being publishers running their own individual, mostly static sites with no user interaction, to user-generated content (social media, photo and video sharing sites, forums, wikis, etc) with some level of interoperability between sites.