I would go further: the idea that great research comes out of the private sector is a myth perpetuated by self-aggrandizing corporate heads. Even most AI research is the result of decades of academic work on cognitive science coming out of universities. (The big exception is transformer technology coming out of Google.) mRNA vaccines are based on publicly funded university research too. All the tech in smartphones like GPS and wifi comes from publicly funded research. The fact is, science works best when it’s open and publicly accountable, which is why things like peer review exist. Privatized knowledge generation is at a disadvantage compared to everyone openly working together.

The private sector is very good at the consumer facing portion of innovation, like user experience, graphical interfaces, and design. But the core technologies, with rare exception, almost never came out of the Silicon Valley.

At this point, I only keep Chrome around for the odd website that only works on Chrome. It's astonishing how quickly Google is burning through good will lately.

I think it's such a boomer-y perspective to treat phones as toys. For a lot of people, smartphones are their main computer. People do their homework, do research, learn languages, fill out forms, and lots of other productive activities.

Even communication is not frivolous. What if someone wants to talk to their father working in a factory in distant Guangdong for their birthday?

I feel like we’re getting old. Is this our “kids these day can’t even change their own oil” moment?

I don’t think Canada has an Alabama. As conservative as they are, Alberta is wealthy, highly educated, and they frequently vote for women and POC. They like “small government”, but also have some of the highest paid government workers in the country. I just don’t see much similarity.

I think the comparison to Texas is more apt because they’re both conservative petro states with center left suburban sprawl cities.

The "front page" of lemmy, either the local of the instance you're on or the "all", is pretty bad. Low quality, uninteresting, obscure, sometimes vaguely rude. News about small video games, hyper specific gripes, obscure memes, uninteresting articles with no comments. Compare that to reddit when it was good, which reliably emphasized the biggest world news stories, genuinely interesting user anecdotes or personal stories, academic knowledge (especially AskHistorians), videos or images that grip you, etc. I'm not sure what the issue is with lemmy's front page. Is it an algorithm problem? Something to do with federation? Is the user base merely too small for now and this will improve on its own with more engagement?

It's too bad because the "front page" is the user's first taste of lemmy. Most users will browse without making an account for a while before finally making an account and subscribing to specific communities.

In general, I think lemmy is already great. There are starting to be lots of cool communities, and even if the quantity is lower, the quality seems to be higher.

Blame the laws and three decades of Borkian precedent.

The real holy grail would be all this open source. “Free for now” doesn’t inspire much confidence.

Predictable Musk apologist.

Tesla is the only company with such incorrect range estimates. There is now tons of evidence, such as internal communication, indicating that this was intentional lying. If they win, the payout will be to all affected, not just to those filing suit.

For me, getting rid of the old reddit design as default was pretty egregious. Usability tanked if I wasn't logged in.

What counts as “education”? China recently has the chess world champion. Is studying opening chess moves “education”? I doubt it. Is reading video game websites in English to study English “education “? There are so many useful ways to let people flourish by following their passions.

In all seriousness though, it’s been really stable. Even this down time was short. This is a volunteer team and they’re running one of the best instances on the fediverse.

Americans support a lot of things they don’t vote for. Most Americans want universal healthcare, higher taxes on the rich, more government services, etc. But many famously “vote against their interests”. Abortion is turning out to be the surprising exception.

I’m not in favor of investigating things frivolously when there is no reason to think there’s any wrongdoing.

I’ve never had a problem with wake from sleep on Mac in years. I’ve never even heard of anyone else having a problem. Is this widespread?

I don’t know about that. Twitter seemed like a pretty stable platform before the acquisition, not a platform on the decline. Lots of problems, but now it’s a whole different level.

Outside of the US and Canada, electric bikes look to be the future instead of mainly electric cars. E-bikes are not just massively more environmentally friendly, they’re also radically reshaping city design to be more livable. I hope the future isn’t just a different kind of car. I hope, for the sake of the environment and society, it’s a world with fewer cars.

Strongly disagree. Trains are nice everywhere in the world. There’s no reason they can’t be nice in the US. Cars are trash. Strip malls are trash. Giant parking lots are trash. The sky high cost of cars is trash. The environmental impact of cars is trash. The danger of cars is trash. Car centric urban planning is trash.

Self-driving cars are safer… than the most dangerous thing ever. But because cars are inherently so dangerous, they are still more dangerous than just about any other mode of transportation.

Dreaming is nice, but that’s all self-driving cars are right now. I don’t see why we don’t have better dreams.

Lots. Toasters, refrigerators, robot vacuums, thermostats, smart home lights, etc.

The reason why self-driving cars are extra tricky is both because they have a much more complex task and the negative consequences are sky high. If a robot vacuum screws up, it's not a big deal. This is why it's totally irresponsible to advertise something as having "full" autonomy when the stakes are so high.

I thought it wasn’t, but dumber things exist so I had the slightest uncertainty.

This is a good idea too, but I do see them as different implementations with different advantages.

• "Following" is much simpler to implement, because it uses mostly existing systems. That's a big bonus.
• "Following" is essentially automatic cross-posting, right? Presumably, everything from the followed community is cross-posted to the follower communities. I can't think of when I would ever prefer that over getting selective cross-posts. Sometimes I don't want to blast stuff out to all communities. Sometimes I want to post something in a local community, and other times I want to hear from all related (sibling) communities. Maybe it's just too centralized for me.
• Siblings are related to each other but retain their unique identity. A followed person doesn't need to know or care about the follower, and doesn't have to allow any input from the follower. "Sibling" relations are bidirectional, while "follower" relations are unidirectional (though both sides can follow each other). I think all this has a big functional difference.

I suppose some of this is a matter of taste as well.

We spend billions subsidizing oil and gas, which are industries with dimming importance in the future. Meanwhile, we have some of the best artificial intelligence, computer science, cognitive science university programs in the world, and we send all of our graduates to the US.

We should nurture a tech sector in Canada, not just focus solely on natural resources.

It’s not right though. Tesla was uniquely inaccurate. This Ars Technica article I read a few days ago goes into more detail. No other manufacturer has such inaccurate range estimates. In fact, most exceed their estimates.

There is truth but also some corporate myth making here. The main elements of the modern GUI was presented during the so-called Mother of all demos by Douglas Engelbart. Engelbart would later work at Parc to make working prototypes of his ideas he already developed at the Stanford Research Institute. Now the corporate side of the history dominates the story. Same with Ethernet, which was an extension of a researcher’s dissertation work. This sort of corporate historical revisionism is exactly what I’m addressing.

At one point, this man had a realistic shot at being president. It’s like what we would be reading about Trump had he lost in 2016.

This might be a dumb question, but is this real?

I think that really understates the financial difference. Before Musk, Twitter was at just about break even for years and even had a few profitable years. Now, X is near bankruptcy. It’s saddled with a billion dollar loan while revenue is simultaneously way down as advertisers flee. When I say that Twitter was stable, I also meant financially stable. They had runway to raise more funding or take out loans, and the user base and advertising was growing. X doesn’t have any of those benefits.

I agree. I hesitated to cross-post this, but someone suggested I do so on the original post.

But that shows a structural problem with the user incentives on Lemmy. The norm of discouraging cross-posting itself means that we have a system that actively discourages people from connecting with others. And if we're actively incentivized to unsubscribe from multiple similar communities, that's even worse! These are the opposite of the sort of incentives we should have in a healthy and viable social network.

Yes donating. This is a good cause.

Yes exactly. One could do mental gymnastics to try to defend this, but the balance of evidence and past decisions by Musk makes it obvious that this is far from innocent. This is theft by misrepresentation.

It feels like it’s up all the time when I use it. Must depend on the instance. Even Reddit was frequently down for maintenance and other issues.

Yeah that's a great example, especially because they have slightly different names. If you're not in the know, you might never know.

I can’t live without Obsidian. There are other similar linked note taking apps but Obsidian is the best in my opinion, not least because it just uses your folder structure and plain text markdown. I can’t imagine doing research, or just organizing my life and thoughts, without it.

I agree the iPad is almost completely useless, but I don’t think comparing it to 13 years before the iPad is useful. My MacBook Air is 11 years old and it’s still great because it’s good enough to run YouTube, all the major websites, office suites, etc. It’s still getting security updates from Apple. I think that’s what 90% of people use a laptop for. A computer two years older than it, on the other hand, might be useless. It’s not really linear. Hopefully, iPads from 5 years ago can last over a decade.

I agree. Do you feel this proposal doesn't address that? My hope is that sibling communities would allow us to keep redundancy and diversity while still enjoying some of the benefits of sometimes coming together.

That's interesting. I think I vaguely remember those too. The term "affiliates" sounds so corporate nowadays, but I think it's a similar idea.

I'm also strongly in the camp of "stay separate". I wouldn't ever want to give that up. But I'm also frequently frustrated by discoverability of related communities and needlessly separated small userbases.

Conant and Ashby’s good regulator theorem in cybernetics says, “Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system.”

The AI needs an accurate model of a human to predict how humans move. Predicting the path of a human is different than predicting the path of other objects. Humans can stand totally motionless, pivot, run across the street at a red light, suddenly stop, fall over from a heart attack, be curled up or splayed out drunk, slip backwards on some ice, etc. And it would be computationally costly, inaccurate, and pointless to model non-humans in these ways.

I also think trolley problem considerations come into play, but more like normativity in general. The consequences of driving quickly amongst humans is higher than amongst human height trees. I don’t mind if a car drives at a normal speed on a tree lined street, but it should slow down on a street lined with playing children who could jump out at anytime.

This is why I said fewer cars, not no cars. Most people obviously do not drive 160 miles a day. With better infrastructure and public transportation, a 2 car family might go down to 1 car, or replace half of their car trips with other modalities, etc.

Anything that I will experience the use of a lot. Computer, shoes, daily bag, etc.

I think a daily takeout coffee that lasts just half an hour a day, on the other hand, is an expensive luxury.

Good idea. Will do.