Literally money. More specifically, the financial need under a capitalist system for businesses to constantly grow and increase profits, and to focus on shareholder profits over making a good product. Most businesses on any sort of large scale today aren't in it to do a good job at making whatever it is they make, they're in it to make money. Their actual 'business' is just an incidental stop on the way to making more money.

You see this literally everywhere. Remember Odwalla? They made these great, super-thick bottled smoothy-like juices. Easily the healthiest thing you could find to drink in most of the places they were sold. Then Coca-Cola bought them out, changed the name to Naked Juice, and watered them all down. What we have now, as a result, is a pale imitation of what we once had.

Why? Because Odwalla was profitable, so it was profitable for Coca-cola to buy up a competitor for shelf space. But once they were bought up, there's no incentive to deliver the same quality of product. They have no remaining competition, so they can release a shittier version and we'll basically just suck it up because it's still healthier than soda.

Our reward for worshiping currency is for everything ever made out of love of a craft or an art to be exploited and turned into a shittier version of itself.

The solution, to my reckoning, is to start making things you love because you love to make them and to refuse to sell out when they come knocking.

Okay, so as a cab driver I have a lot of opportunities to get frustrated with how selfish and myopic people are. But you know what happens when I do that? I make myself miserable.

I, personally, find that my mental state is much, much better the more I'm willing to accept people not doing things 'the right way'. Yes, I could get annoyed for the hypothetical people who might encounter an obstacle to their mobility here (who have not and may not ever arrive), but what will that actually do for me or for anyone else?

Unless I'm actually moving the obstacle my disapproval is completely useless. It may even cause me to do something stupid and inconsiderate myself as I become distracted by my annoyance.

But if I just let it go, smile, and move on, the utter insignificance of the action can just fade into the background and not make itself part of my focus on how to reflect on humanity or my day.

I forwarded all my gmail addresses to proton recently. I'm very pleased! It works a lot better than gmail-to-gmail forwarding and the UI is purple! Purple!!

What's it going to take to actually do something about these ultra-rich leeches literally destroying our planet and everything good on it to inflate a number in a bank somewhere? How do we actually build up the initiative to stop it?

All our other problems seem largely centered around our inability to appropriately respond to extreme greed. Not only in actually actively stopping it, but in even identifying it or being able to properly censure it in the first place. The moment you start talking about the rich being the cause of our problems, there's a section of society that starts tuning you out. I definitely feel like as things get worse people are starting to catch on, but even once we're there, where do we go?

If we actually get to the point of agreeing that excessive wealth is inherently misanthropic and should be a crime in and of itself, how do we make it a crime while so much power sits in the hands of those who'd be on the losing end of that decision?

I hope the WGA and SAG can spark a change in people's consciousness around labor. I'd honestly love to see a lot more interviews and independent podcasts coming from the picket lines. If there's anyone who can convince Americans to fight for the value of their labor, it's the people write and play the parts in the stories they love.

Right! This is why I say it has more to do with being stubborn than being smart. If you're determined to find a solution and you're half decent at research and following instructions, you can figure a lot out, but people treat it like you invented the thing with some magical knowledge that they could never possess.

It's not that people think content from Reddit is stealing, it's that we don't want our feeds polluted with bots autoposting bullshit.

Why would we want a whole copy of Reddit? Reddit is a toxic pit.

So far this is the only bot on Lemmy that actually adds to the experience. Well done!

Talk about an inaccurate headline. The conclusion here isn't that AI art can't be copyrighted, it's that AI cannot be a copyright holder. But it's AI, so we can't actually expect anyone to pull their head out of their ass and give it enough thought to write an article that isn't garbage.

Instead we have yet another thread about this case in which no one actually has any idea what the ruling was. Very informative.

I honestly wouldn't give those people the dignity of calling them leftists. They're too concerned about cosplaying as activists and dunking on people to actually give a shit about advancing the rights of real people or trying to protect anything good.

Seems like EA doesn't want to make games anymore. Folks should oblige them.

Why do so many Europeans seem to think the whole country is Texas?

I definitely noticed that it's pretty seamlessly replaced Reddit for me at this point. It's been a decent source of stuff to read and there's enough of it now that I don't feel like I'm just seeing the same thing repeatedly.

I like reading articles and discussions, so it's nice to be able to have that without propping up some big toxic company.

I've begun blocking their communities in my accounts and I plan to defederate from them when i get home. Fuck em. Place is infested with exploding heads anyway.

I'm a night owl. My body wants to go to sleep around 6am and wake up at like 2pm, and if it doesn't get to it will rebel. I used to struggle with resetting my sleep schedule all the time. Falling asleep during the day, gradually drifting later on my days off, and usually feeling kinda shit.

Went back to working nights, driving a cab 5p-12a or 3p-12a depending on the day. I love it. I feel so much better. My body is never easy, but it's a hell of a lot easier than it was. One less thing to worry about.

It is hard to make appointments, and companies are always trying to call my firmly muted phone at 9am when I tell them not to, but it's a lot more comfortable. I see all kinds of neat crepuscular animals and there's like no traffic.

I think it very much depends on your body's natural rhythm. People like to chalk it up to 'insomnia', but that's just pathologizing normal behavior. Nothing wrong with being nocturnal.

To be fair, someone with a more basic grasp of computers probably has fewer use cases that Linux will give you trouble with. I installed PuppyLinux on some ancient machine for someone I was renting from in like '08 and it was fine for her, but that's because all she ever did was look at YouTube and check her email. It didn't have any of the features of modern Ubuntu and the UI was clunky; if memory serves it didn't even have DHCP.

It worked fine for basic browsing, but if you tried to do anything more complex, you'd better be ready to learn a thing or two.

Today it's still pretty similar. Ubuntu and GNU at large have come a long way in the past couple of decades, but you still start running into issues when you get to more niche use cases.

I'd probably be running Ubuntu as my daily if Solaar worked properly with my MX Ergo, but it doesn't, so I can't. I guess I could go learn how to make contributions to patch that myself, and I may at some point, but at the moment I have stuff to get done and dealing with an unexpected hiccup in my workflow too often brings everything to a grinding halt.

Ew, some cop took a sharpie to their cat. :(

Honestly, it's begun to feel more hostile and shady. Pretty sure the Russian trolls are here, but hexchan ain't helping either. I'm waiting for a client side instance block feature. We really need it.

That's not just reading comprehension. People are always answering my questions with unapplicable answers.

"Is it on the left or the right?"

"It's 67, the one with grass in the yard."

Just answer the damn question rather than providing me other information you decide would be more helpful!

I'll believe it in a couple of years if he doesn't turn up having faked his death again.

Nice, where do I get my $5k?

Can I have it? I'd never buy one but I use Spotify constantly in my cab. It'd be nice to have it not attached to my phone.

A good number of them seem to be trying to import reddit into Lemmy wholesale.

I don't really engage with anything I don't see as a thoughtful reply made in good faith. Sometimes. But I try not to.

Queer is great. It's one syllable rather than four plus. And honestly, I think it comes off as a little more down to Earth.

You just described AOL in the 90s.

Right, but this is fundamentally at odds with the 'Linux for everyone', 'Linux for gaming', and 'Linux can replace Windows for most use cases' rhetoric.

If you enjoy Linux for its own sake and you like fiddling around with it and learning its ins and outs, it's fantastic. But if you just want the OS to get out of the way so you can get back to what your were doing, it leaves some room for improvement.

We can't have both, and that's fine. There's also an argument to be made for people getting used to dealing with a command line because it's something of a prerequisite for getting away from increasingly shady corporate overreach. But that doesn't help me when the solution to getting my extra mouse buttons and precision mode is to create a well documented bug report for Solaar and then wait. I just want my push to talk to work, you know?

That gap is definitely shrinking as time goes on, but it's still an obstacle and it'll always be part of the conversation around GNU until it's no longer a concern for one reason or another.

I think it leaves us with factory feudalism.

Ragebait with no article access. Shoo off back to corpo media, we don't want none.

Even beyond corporate media I see a lot of people having this mentality that the Fediverse has to become a behemoth to succeed. We don't need that, though. There's no profit motive, so it can actually just exist as itself. No incompetent board members making bad decisions, no selling out to make a buck, just a platform that people can actually use

We spent the five years training the model. Manually. With Captcha data.

Now we're teaching it not to run traffic signals, hit motorcycles or busses, or try to drive up stairs.

I dream of this kind of storage. I just added a second m.2 with a couple of TB on it and the space is lovely but I can already see I'll fill it sooner than I'd like.

The only good thing that's been done in Florida this year. I'd love it if public spaces were a little more accessible for people with allergies.

I honestly can't tell if it's just a collective expiration date for a culture of wealthy incompetence, or if someone's been manipulating powerful idiots, but it almost feels like there's a coordinated effort to stir an abandonment of corporate platforms.

I'd like to block all users and posts from hexchan, exploding heads, and lemmygrad. I don't care if it sends the data as long as it blocks it from my UI.

What's that written in? Python? I need to learn Python.

This. I literally block every bot and every bot-infested community.

What Nebula really needs is some content that isn't just people talking about stuff. I can appreciate a video essay now and then, but it's the whole platform. I have a subscription right now, really only because of Philosophytube, but I can't really find anything I'm that interested in watching.

It really needs some like sketch comedy, tech reviews, dumb little videos of people out doing stuff, or like, cats sitting on roombas. Cater to something other than wanting to listen to people blather their opinions all day.

Took me a second to realize this isn't about elephants.

Wow! I think I'll go back to school!

I'm doing it with Calckey myself, but Communities basically act like users. You can search and follow them. You'll get to see posts in that community in your feed, and you can make top-level comments and reply to direct replies on your own comments, but if you want to see comments that aren't responding to you you'll have to switch over to Lemmy.

I basically just browse my own Calckey front page now and then when I see a Lemmy thread that looks interesting I open it in Lemm.ee or Blahaj.zone.

On Calckey you just search for @NAME@INSTANCE, whether the name is a community or an individual you'll be able to follow them!

Edit: I made a little VIA macro, so now I've got a hotkey that grabs the link in my current clipboard and searches it in lemm.ee. Made it a lot easier!

{+KC_LCTL}{40}k{40}{-KC_LCTL}{40}{KC_BSPC}{40}lemm.ee/search{1130}{+KC_ENT}{88}{-KC_ENT}{4067}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{+KC_LCTL}v{169}{-KC_LCTL}{703}{KC_ENT}{4000}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{KC_TAB}{KC_ENT}

Yep. Lots of stuff. Livejournal, Myspace, AOL, Digg.

Protesting platforms that feed on engagement by engaging with those platforms is very silly. You won't fix them.

If you think Reddit turned space back on thinking people wouldn't use it to protest and to promote alternatives, I feel like you haven't been paying attention. They feed on rage, it keeps their numbers up.

What they can't feed on is letting them die because we don't need or care about them anymore. Like Mab at the end of the 90s Merlin miniseries.