The Boost for Lemmy app preview looks promising for RIF refugees
Or the fact that once it's off of your hard drive and sitting comfortably on their cloud (their hard drive), they can scan it and harvest it for data.
deweydecibel
1 Post – 1086 Comments
Joined 1 years ago
I can't imagine having to move state to keep my job, but having to move from California to Florida especially feels like an outrageous demand. Not just because of distance but because...I mean, are you fucking serious?? Florida? You want me to move from the biggest, bluest, mostly progressive state...to Florida?
There's no amount of compensation in the world that would make me do that. That's borderline self-harm.
...what? What are you basing this on?
When the children were small, Wendy and Mike worked various jobs, including machine operator, housekeeper, and cashier.
...
Wendy had become a certified nursing assistant, but she continued to struggle financially. The family was repeatedly evicted.
...
In 2018, shortly after another eviction, Wendy filed for bankruptcy. She developed a gastrointestinal bleed that required hospitalization, and Faith was also hospitalized, after an attempted overdose involving over-the-counter painkillers
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/05/kyle-rittenhouse-american-vigilante
You can see their strategy at work here.
It is possible to keep individual files on the local hard drive with different settings (that in my experience never seem to stick past updates).
The default, though, is to take everything on your computer off of your computer, put it into the cloud (their computer), and recommend you pick and choose which ones stay on your computer. In essence, they want you to think of your computer as secondary to their computer. An extension of it.
There is no "your computer", it's just the computer you happen to be logged into at the moment.
The cloud is not something you take advantage of, the cloud is where you live now.
Some of these are good, some are just needlessly assertive nonsense. Especially the two where it's actively refusing to acknowledge fault or apologize for it, which is standard PR crap. Refusing to apologize and instead saying "thanks for your patience" is what I expect to hear from my ISP when they miss their scheduled install, not from a coworker.
There's nothing wrong with being a normal human being that is capable of admitting their own shortcomings. If never saying sorry means "being a boss" then that explains why there's so many sociopaths as CEOs.
"Hope that make sense?" Vs "Let me know if you have any questions."
The latter is saying "here's the explanation, figure it out, bother me again if you can't". The fromer, while poorly worded, is being helpful, actively attempting to make sure the person understands before leaving them to it. It's both a kindness and doing your due diligence.
Reddit's value as a social media platform drops as it's value to advertisers rises. The karma system is democratic, the userbase shapes the visual content on the site, that's was makes it useful. The more mutilated it becomes in service of extracting money from advertising, the less genuine it is, and the less people will seek to use it.
Spez would like to believe Reddit is a cow that can be milked forever.
In reality Reddit is a pig that Spez seems to believe he can get bacon from forever. Except to get that bacon, you have to kill it, and you can only do that once.
PSA: If you’re not using uBlock Origin to block ads, please install it. Firefox - Chrome. Every other mainstream adblocker sells your data in some capacity, but uBlock Origin is open source.
It's not just about it being open source, it's about the mentality of the people running it. The lead dev for uBlock Origins is hard line on ad blocking and privacy. He fundamentally believes in what they created. That's the only person you want running something like that.
And they tell users to use Firefox, by the way, because uBlock on Chromium has been handicapped. If you want the full uBlock experience, Firefox is the one and only browser to use it on.
Edit: BTW if you ever want to cheer yourself up, take a look around the closed issues for uBlockOrigins on Git. Every now and again you come across some marketing company stooge stumbling in asking why some address is being blocked and asking for it to be whitelisted, only to get a hard no, then get flummoxed as if they don't understand why. It's beautiful.
headlines have focused on the detrimental effect this will have on ad blockers, which will need to adopt a complex workaround to work as now. There is a risk that users reading those headlines might seek to delay updating their browser, to prevent any ad blocker issues; you really shouldn’t go down this road—the security update is critical.
It's almost like tying together feature updates with security updates was a deliberate choice by tech companies so that they could tell users shit exactly like this.
How can there be any real market choices when software literally tells users "for your own safety, you must abandon the things you want, and take the things we give you". How can consumers influence the direction of the product if they never have the option to decline that direction?
Rolling Stone first out of the gate with the true elbow-drop of a headline this news deserves, and a beefy polemic to back it up.
This article, along with every other news site's, has been sitting there primed and ready to release for years and years, needing nothing but a minor edit to add the relevant details of his passing and the date. Someone at Rolling Stone is delighted today to have finally hit "Publish" .
And too right they should. It's a great day.
I think we can count on Biden's campaign being stacked with young, media-savy people, like it was last time. A lot of his 2020 stuff was pretty well done, you could tell he had a pretty in-touch team that knew how to present him well. Literally all he has to do is not get in their way, and they can ride Dark Brandon memes into 2024.
I know there’s a ton of skepticism about Meta entering the fediverse — it’s completely understandable,” Cottle says. “I do want to kind of make a plea that I think everyone on the team has really good intentions. We really want to be a good member of the community and give people the ability to experience what the fediverse is.”
Your intentions mean exactly nothing when you're being paid by Zuckerberg.
It also doesn't actually matter what you intend, because the problem isn't just what the platform can do, it's about Meta being in this space and trying to stake a claim in it. We came here to escape you. Go the fuck away.
It's also because Burning Man, at least in the last decade or more, just turned into another affluent, rich white people and influencer event. Whatever it was to start, it's effectively glamping now.
Sure, there are definitely some genuinely good people there, lower middle class, saved up and took their only vacation time they get all year to spend a few days there, and it sucks this happened to them. If those people end up in the hospital and the shitty insurance they get from work does fuck all to help mitigate the expenses, I'll even get angry on their behalf.
But the majority of them? They spent a lot of money, money most people don't have the luxury of getting to spend, on a pointless self-indulgent festival in the fucking desert, and this time it's come back to bite them. My sympathy is extremely limited.
They'll be miserable for a few days, get out, dry off, and go back to their easy lives. Their affairs are taken care of back home, they can miss days of work, their hospital stays will be covered, etc.
It's kind of like the Fyre Festival. Those people got fucked over hard, but those people were also not the kind I particularly pitty. Spending a lot of money on an experience only to be miserable for a few days is not a tragedy. What happened to the poor people that lived there is the tragedy.
Edit: Also just want to point out OP is trying to call this a "tragedy" when there's only been one suspected death, the cause of which is unknown as it hasn't even been confirmed yet, but the overall mood is positive, and by all accounts everything is being managed. They're trapped, not dying.
I don't think it's that big of a deal if it's an event or 1p release but I can see why people wouldn't like it tbh,
For the love of all things holy, can you people, for once in your lives, oppose something on principle? This weak-ass justification, this "it ain't that bad" shit is exactly why we end up with something far worse in a few years. They count on this.
Do you know what Microsoft learned from the Xbox One launch? They didn't learn not to be anti-consumer, they just learned that they need to do so slowly and gradually. The mistake they made was going too hard too fast, and creating kickback. They learned to implement little things, the things that "aren't that bad". And then another one a few months later. And another one after that.
It's called boiling a frog. It works because of the average person's passivism.
So please, I'm begging you, think forward. Develop some pattern recognition. Stop downplaying the minor things just to be contrarian and defend a billion dollar company from perfectly valid criticism.
Problem is the entire concept of a site like reddit being "for profit" in the first place.
I know we all wax nostalgic about the old non-centralized Internet with its various small websites and forums, but one thing I do genuinely miss from those days was that those places existed because the people running them wanted them to exist. They had ads or took donations to keep the lights on, but no one was looking to get rich. Passion, not profit.
The decentralized internet was run more by people, the centralized internet is run by board rooms.
That's why I like the idea of the fediverse. That is why this place feels familiar to those early days.
Are we seriously sitting here, in the shadow of the open internet's apocalypse, complaining yet again about Firefox's UI?
It's like Superman trying to rescue you from a fire and you complaining about his breath.
There's no UI in the world that will make the internet bareable without functional ad blockers.
Be prepared for a lot of hand-wringing about "security".
Apple, Microsoft, and Google all learned in the last couple years "security" shuts down any arguments, and they use it at every turn to justify whatever they want, regardless of the actual dangers or alternative mitigation methods they could take.
If our modern software security means anti-competitive behavior and user lock-in tactics are OK, then that's a problem with our security practices, and we need to reevaluate some things.
And when they got on the phone, Ty assumed the recruiter, who introduced herself as Jaime, was human. But things got robotic.
If regulators are trying to come up with AI regulations, this is where you start.
It should be a law that no LLM/"AI" is allowed to pass itself off as human. They must always state, up front, what they are. No exceptions.
Are Microsoft a big, evil company?
A. No, that’s insanely reductive. They’re super smart people, and sometimes super smart people make mistakes. What matters is what they do with knowledge of mistakes.
I have no doubt there are smart employees, but they don't call the shots. Case in point.
The dude set up a strawman argument, then didn't even bother to burn it down properly.
Y'all remember when Congress tried to pass a bill that would have expedited these cases and given the justice department more resources so they could prosecute each on to the fullest extent of the law? And then Republicans blocked it.
Some of the communities that closed down in response to the API changes explicitly shifted to Discord
Sigh
Legitimately one of the most annoying things out of all of this is how so many tech writers have no idea what they're talking about when it comes to explaining the feelings and behavior of reddit communities. Like they don't ever seem to interview anyone or ask direct questions to understand what is happening, they just take a cursory glance at comment threads and pinned posts, and assume they understand what's going on. I can't count how many articles I have read that get the facts about this whole situation right but still seem to completely misunderstand it.
They did not "shift" to Discord, they used already established Discord channels in lieu of the subreddit, until the subreddit came back.
Many subs already had parallel discord channels, but users don't use one or the other, they use both. Because Discord is a fundamentally different kind of platform. It's exactly the same way that many forums back in the day would also have chat rooms attached. Same community, using two different methods of online communication, at the same time, for different purposes. No one would ever have suggested IRC was equatable to a forum.
All that happened was when the subs closed, users congregated in the Discord to stay connected. It was never going to be a new permanent home. They were not seeking a new home, that's the critical part. I've seen very, very few people suggest Discord as a permanent replacement and if they are it gets shot down. They were simply waiting out the protest on Discord until they could go back to Reddit or, if an alternative showed up, go there. It was a bomb shelter.
Let's not pretend it's all about "bad actors". They don't want masked traffic at all, the "bad actors" gives them an excuse.
And we know this because if the IP was the issue, they wouldn't let you use the site at all, but they will work fine after signing in. Any of these VPNs work as long as you're logged into reddit, even with a throwaway account.
The use of "sentenced to life" here is one of the most blatant click/ragebait headlines I've seen in a while. And looking at the comments, people are eating it up.
He has not been sentenced to life. He's in a hospital until deemed fit to release, because he's destroying property, injuring people, and declaring a desire to return to crime.
Yeah, it's funny when it's Rockstar, less so when it's your social media or bank. If he can't bring himself to at least commit to saying he won't do something illegal just to get through court, then his lack of self control speaks to someone who's going to do some shit and wind up arrested again.
If the staff can get him to calm down enough to stand trial, he's out.
Also, remember he was already put on bail once:
A mental health assessment used as part of the sentencing hearing said he "continued to express the intent to return to cyber-crime as soon as possible. He is highly motivated."
The jury was told that while he was on bail for hacking Nvidia and BT/EE and in police protection at a Travelodge hotel, he continued hacking and carried out his most infamous hack.
Despite having his laptop confiscated, Kurtaj managed to breach Rockstar, the company behind GTA, using an Amazon Firestick, his hotel TV and a mobile phone.
The planes first received spoofed GPS signals, meaning signals designed to fool planes’ systems into thinking they are flying miles away from their real location. One of the aircraft almost flew into Iranian airspace without permission
Tomorrow Never Dies continues to be bizarrely relevant.
I mean....yeah? Did you think progress was going to come from the outside? Someone's gotta make an effort to steer the ship the right way.
The best way to fuck a democratic process up is making votes public. No one should feel like there's a "deterrent" to voting. All that does is create incentive to reward/punish people for how they vote.
Voting is what fuels the content aggregation, too. It is a very bad idea to deter people from voting how they please because it strangles the algorithm of the data it needs to sort the content. You want people voting, a lot. That's what makes the whole thing work.
Edit: which is to say nothing of how bad it will get when people make tools that help automate retaliation for downvotes. You can potentially state an opinion in a comment and set up a bot to auto block every downvoter, then share that list publicly. You may think that sounds like a great system for weeding out hate but I promise you it's going to be far messier than that, and more importantly, this kind of retaliatory shit hurts the aggregation even more.
I'm getting here too late for this to be visible, but fuck it.
The difference is Apple doesn't pass any information on to the website. It just tells the website whether or not it passes their integrity check. Your web environment gets the Apple stamp of approval or it doesn't, that's all the sites will know.
Googles shit is going pass actual information about the browser state, add-ons, and the device to the site so they can restrict access based on any criteria they choose. That creates endless more avenues for abuse by giving the websites the ability to judge you for themselves and micromanage how you are allowed to visit their site.
Apple's is the equivalent of a metal detector before walking into a building. It will go off but it doesn't violate your privacy or enable targeted screening by telling anyone what it detected.
Google's is the equivalent of a strip search, where it will drop your clothes and pictures of your junk onto the property managers desk so they can decide if you're worthy to enter. Maybe they don't like your brand of underwear, or a tattoo you have, and refuse to let you in.
What’s more, developers tell us that Meta’s motivation behind the API’s shutdown is unclear. On the one hand, it could be that Facebook Groups don’t generate ad revenue and the shutdown of the API will leave developers without a workaround. But Meta hasn’t clarified if that’s the case.
No, that's definitely it, you got it.
The promises of web 2.0 simply can't survive in the capital-poisioned wasteland the Internet has become.
Why do we want anything to change?
Why are we still sitting on this new platform talking about ways reddit can be saved?
What's happening to reddit is the end result of the sort of platform it is and the current state of the tech industry. With or without spez, its course is set, nothing we do will slow or reverse it.
Feels like maybe there's some younger people here that haven't gone through the death of a platform/site before. Us older social media folks have seen this time and time again, have had to migrate from self-destructing platform to self-destructing platform many times.
So take it from me: reddit is done. No matter what happens next, it is never recovering. There will be no reset button or rolling back anything. The damage is permanent, and the profit incentives run too deep.
Let it go.
It has awakened the American public, finally, to the peril of the theocratic future toward which the country has been hurtling
If they were still asleep after the death of Roe, why would this wake them up?
The problem is the public at large is like a kid trying to stick a penny in a light socket. You can tell them again and again and again and again that it's going to hurt, but they're not going to learn the lesson until they actually feel the shock.
Only after they experience the pain do they feel the urgency to do something. Only when "politics" stops being a feed they look at on social media and actually affects their lives in a direct and obvious way do they seek to do anything.
Lol again with this? Wealthy fucks have been trying this since the 1700s. It never works.
Kind of wish they would stop trying to push this as "editing".
If all you can do is draw on top of it, you're not actually editing it.
I'm not shaming them, I understand why they can't have a full built-in PDF editor, but people that don't know any better are going to open it up expecting an actual editor and be disappointed.
It is shocking because they did it after the investigation had started, which is monumentally stupid.
You can destroy any records you want at any time, unless there's an investigation underway or you have good reason to believe one will be starting. At that point, you're destroying evidence.
SEO solved the problem it was meant to fix, i.e. "users arent looking at our site enough." You're fooling yourself if you think it was ever about making searches more useful for the user.
The very conceit of SEO defeats the purpose of a search. The idea is the search combs through sites, finds what the user wants, and returns it to them based on what it believes is the closest match to what the user wanted. It's a process between two parties: the user and the search engine. The second the websites start trying to inject themselves into this process by adjusting their content to the search, it corrupts the process.
Picture yourself in a library looking through the card catalog. You're searching for something, using a system to locate it. Imagine if the books you're looking for spontaneously changed their titles or authorship just to "help you find them" while you're flipping through cards. Imagine if you're walking down the shelves and books are literally shifting around like fucking Hogwarts, trying to get in front of you.
That is the inherent issue with SEO. No one but the user knows what the user wants to see, the content trying to adjust itself to appear in the results more consistently isn't about helping the user find what they want, it's about making sure the user sees that specific content.
Because every website wants traffic. That's all it is.
Artificial engagement only gets you so far.
I only say something when I have something to say. If I don't, then it becomes a chore.
I get this is the go-to response now, for good reason, but there isn't really anything too shady going on with this particular case at least not from Google. This is more about them trying to keep SEOs from figuring out how they rank things so they can't pollute the search results even more.
Every comment is shitting on Google but here is the what the SEO expert said about the leak when it was presented to them:
This person’s sole aim appeared quite aligned with my own: to hold Google accountable for public statements that conflict with private conversations and leaked documentation, and to bring greater transparency to the field of search marketing. And they believed that, despite my years removed from SEO, I was the best person to share this publicly.
Just read through that blog. Look at the absolute indignity these SEO assholes have at the idea that the search engine wouldn't tell them exactly how to fuck it up with their garbage.
This is entirely about advertising. Hell, the leaker revealed their identity, and it's the guy that runs this company:
Companies like this and the assholes behind them are a cancer on the internet and they have been for a very long time. You cannot point the finger at Google and not also point the finger at them, they are the other half of the shit equation.
Driving behavior analysis, or telematics, as the insurance industry calls it, could be better for consumers, leading to personalized rates that are more fair. Plus, if people have to pay more for their risky driving, they may drive more cautiously, leading to safer roads. But this will happen only if drivers are aware that their behavior is being monitored.
I'm so sick of this shit.
Just like the stop sign cameras, this only increases safety by penalizing and then monetizing minor mistakes that humans make. This is not about safety, it's about maximizing income through technological micromanaging of drivers who have not caused an accident and were not in danger of causing one.
You'd also have to be a damn fool not to realize that all the data they're collecting may not apply to their rate structure today, but in the future that rate structure will change, and suddenly a history of driver data you let them gather about you goes from being unremarkable to indicative of a problem.
The shareholders are demanding a blood sacrifice, so rates suddenly go up for people that have a driver score beneath a certain threshold where previously that threshold was higher.
Or some new bullshit study comes out claiming people that listen to podcasts while driving are infinitesimally more likely to cause an accident than people that listen to music, and whoops, Michael Barbaro has been your constant companion on every morning commute for the last 4 years. That's a pattern of risky behavior.
Feel like we're watching a lot of tech companies making a lot of bad decisions all at once. Reddit, Google, Netflix, Meta, Twitter, Hulu, etc. Regardless of the individual circumstances and bad actors in each case, it feels like they're all being fueled by a shared, low-key desperation.
Everything about Reddit's most recent changes has been openly about cracking the place wide open for corporate marketing. Everything good about it was because of how genuine it was, and it was genuine because for a very long time, the attitude was to shield it against corporate influence.
That's the only reason it became such a valuable place for search results: as the forums and blogs around the Internet went silent and corporations ravaged individual websites, reddit was a bubble of genuine interaction. It's not just Google's shitty algorithm, it's also because the Internet itself got injected with shit, and reddit was a safe haven. A deeply flawed one, but still, notably less fake and corporate than the web pages around it.
That's what gave it value.
Spez knows this. The admins have known this the whole damn time. That's why there used to be rules against self-posting content. That's why celebrities were only allowed to promote things in AMAS. To head off attention seeking, marketing, and corporate influence.
But the time came to make money, and they're burning it all down to accomplish that.
I will never not share this blog because it hits the nail so cleanly on the head it sails straight down to the core of the earth:
Stop talking to each other and start buying things
It's not just about ads, it's about the corruption of public spaces. The death of social media is when someone tries to start making money off it at the expense of its genuine human interaction, which can not exist in that environment unmolested, and will cascade into the platform's collapse over time. it's enshitification, yes, but it's also something else: "dehumanation". The drowning of the human element of your social platform through profit seeking.
That Edge is now the only "approved" browser anyone is allowed to use, per our admin (taking input from a third party security consultant). Most people in other departments don't care, they use whatever gets put in front of them because their needs are basic and their tolerance for bullshit is too high for their own good. The rest of us in IT (well most of us) hate it.
I had to go uninstall Chrome and even a few Firefox installations, manually, from any workstation that had them. And I've never felt dirtier in my job. Like everytime I punched in my credentials to authorize the uninstall, Microsoft's stock rose by the smallest amount.
Legitimately, the more of a Microsoft 365/Azure/Endpoint/Entra/Shithole/Power BI/SharePoint clusterfuck my workstation becomes, the less enthused I am about the entire IT profession.
This article is giving them too much credit, frankly. Saying Republican support dropped from "majority to minority" is misleading, bordering on clickbait.
All that happened was support dropped from 55% to 46%. They were only ever barely a majority.
Saying "Nearly half" or "over half" of all Republicans don't support gay marriage is splitting hairs. They all support the candidates that are against it.
The real story here is that even support among Democrats and Independents dropped a bit in the last 2 years. Meaning the fear mongering is pervasive enough to affect everyone.