moduspol (u/moduspol)

moduspol commented on Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload windowscentral.com/micros... · Posted by u/jsheard

pixelpoet · 7 days ago

> The question Microsoft should ask themselves is why they built them in the first place

It seems like everyone except MS themselves knows why: they got tunnel vision from Azure and AI, and completely forgot about what actually made them successful.

Hell they even burnt down one of the most famous brands in the world, MS Office, for zero reason other than to try and whitewash their Copilot name. The marketing guys who made that decision urgently need to find another line of work, because literally a Labrador licking his balls all day would have resulted in a better outcome.

The PMs are completely asleep at the wheel, when they aren't actively self-sabotaging.

moduspol · 7 days ago

> they got tunnel vision from Azure and AI, and completely forgot about what actually made them successful.

They also missed the boat on mobile, and I suspect they didn't want to miss the "AI" boat this time around.

moduspol commented on Disrupting the largest residential proxy network cloud.google.com/blog/top... · Posted by u/cdrnsf

kawsper · 9 days ago

Oxylabs sells proxies for scrapers, I suppose you can use the socks-proxy as a VPN, and they claim to use Honeygain.

Honeygain is a platform where people sell their residential internet connection and bandwidth to these companies for money.

For comparison Honeygain pays someone 10 cents per GB, and Oxylabs sells it for $8/GB.

moduspol · 9 days ago

We need a better market. I'd sell for $7/GB.

moduspol commented on Backseat Software blog.mikeswanson.com/back... · Posted by u/zdw

embedding-shape · 10 days ago

If the computer doesn't have any online network connection, shouldn't it outright error? I understand that the timeout sucks when your network is not connected to the internet but still alive, then that's an issue, but if there is no connection at all, why would the timeouts matter?

moduspol · 10 days ago

It wouldn't be able to open a TCP connection without knowing what IP address / interface to use.

You're right--it should outright error. You should only see timeouts like that if you were dropping the packets from some middleware or middlebox, but your client still had a valid IP address.

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moduspol commented on U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/j_maffe

quietsegfault · 12 days ago

You’re confusing two different questions. ‘Should we have more STEM PhDs in government?’ is a reasonable policy debate. ‘Is losing 10,000 STEM PhDs in weeks a problem?’ has a clearer answer… yes, because institutional knowledge doesn’t rebuild quickly. Also, there’s no evidence this was performance-based attrition. Lastly, recruitment becomes harder after mass departures signal instability.

The burden isn’t on critics to prove some theoretical optimal number. The burden is on defenders of this exodus to show it improved government technical capacity rather than hurt it.

moduspol · 12 days ago

I disagree--we're all paying for it, so it should be justified regardless.

And I don't need an optimal number. But the common refrain is essentially that more is always better, and fewer means we're losing our standing in the world. Always.

Maybe keeping a lot of them but shedding some percentage is actually more optimal. But I'm open to being wrong. That's why I'm asking for metrics.

moduspol commented on U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/j_maffe

Retric · 12 days ago

That’s a straw man argument. Losing 10 people becomes a question of their individual qualifications, losing 10,000 people and this is no longer about individuals.

Some of the people who left where underperforming but a significant percentage where extremely underpaid while providing extreme value to average Americans.

moduspol · 12 days ago

The number seems arbitrary. Maybe we should be subsidizing until we have 100,000 more.

I'm always skeptical when something is presumed to be a universal good in a way that's unfalsifiable. What metrics would you expect to see if we had too many STEM PhDs? What metrics can we expect to improve if we had more of them?

moduspol commented on Apple introduces new AirTag with longer range and improved findability apple.com/newsroom/2026/0... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

u8080 · 13 days ago

Why everyone is so okay with wearing a tracking device? Usually there is a crowd who will bring NSA in every possible discussion, but apparently not for this worldwide functioning meter-precise tracking service?

moduspol · 13 days ago

It also happened with doorbell cameras. If you'd have asked people ten years ago if it seemed reasonable for nearly every home to have an Internet-connected camera on the front facing the street (and neighbors' houses), I think you'd get pretty universally negative responses. Yet here we are.

moduspol commented on eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update valueaddedresource.net/eb... · Posted by u/bdcravens

phyzix5761 · 18 days ago

How can they tell its AI buying if the agent uses the right user agent and works through a real browser?

moduspol · 18 days ago

It may just be to stop third parties from creating a whole business out of "shop for me" AI bots. Individual users getting away with it might not be a problem, but with it being against ToS, it'd be a lot more shaky to build a business out of it.

In fact, it may just be that eBay wants to be the business selling AI "buy for me" agents.

moduspol commented on Amazon is ending all inventory commingling as of March 31, 2026 twitter.com/ghhughes/stat... · Posted by u/MrBuddyCasino

xattt · 21 days ago

> Seems like Amazon finally agrees that the counterfeiting issues from commingling are worse than the logistics advantages.

The cynical perspective is that they are facing a serious financial penalty either from the manufacturers themselves, or a large buyer that got burned by co-mingled products, or both.

moduspol · 21 days ago

Or alternatively: they have reduced the expectations of "two day shipping" so much that they no longer need to try that hard (by commingling inventory) to actually meet them.