rwhitisissle

I mean, Jesus famously overcharged on delivery and transaction fees when feeding the masses with all that miraculously created bread and fish while also losing 13 billion dollars in the process, somehow, right?

No, wait, I'm thinking of a different guy...

“The Democratic Party is more invested in trying to maintain control than it is in trying to win an election in November,” said one DNC member.

First time?

Accusing criticism of Biden and his viability as a presidential candidate on "Russian bots" is purely a silencing tactic: a way of dismissing criticism rather than engaging with it by asserting a specific intent behind that criticism that reduces it to a tool of a foreign adversary as opposed to a genuine set of concerns by members of the electorate.

The day Firefox shutters its doors is the day the internet truly dies. Almost every "alternative" browser is chromium under the hood. Google's next big plan is basically constructing a walled garden around the internet (at least the HTTP part) via complex DRM. Eventually, if you want to access an actual web page, it'll have to be via a Chromium browser. Hell, even today a shitload of websites I visit on FF just don't fucking render correctly and I'll have to fire up a chromium instance just to access them. That's only going to get worse with time.

Dissenting opinion, I'm sure, but I see in Lemmy the same problems I saw with reddit at the time I left it: superficial content designed to generate superficial engagement driven by people on mobile devices. Lemmy, reddit, and virtually all other content aggregators fall into the same pattern of posting screenshots from Twitter and recycled memes that everyone's seen. It's like the author of the article says: the internet isn't as interactive or novel as it used to be. Part of that is the centralization of media into a handful of supergiant corporations, but it's also an extension of the technological landscape and how people today interact with the media they consume. Which as time goes on is more and more driven by mobile devices.

At nearly 6 hours long I can confidently say that some things should just be a very long blog post. There's no way I can parse and digest a complex argument about popular media via a youtube video of that size. It's just...I got stuff to do.

They don’t care about gamers or games

There is no such thing as a company that cares about the product they make or the people who buy their product. The purpose of every company is solely to make money. The product itself is, to some degree, arbitrary. The only reason Microsoft even makes video games is because it's adjacent, and in some ways a natural extension of, their original business.

I don't see how they can be releasing a Nintendo Switch 2 when they just released the Nintendo Switch like....a year or two ago. Wait...when did the Switch come out? March of 2017?! Holy shit it's been 7 years.

What is this cursed place?

Oh, boy, where to begin? Digg was originally a content aggregator founded in the middle of 2004 (around 7 or 8 months before Reddit), that was basically Reddit with a slightly sleeker UI. At one point it actually had a higher number of daily active users than Reddit and it was, for several years, Reddit's chief competitor.

The fascinating thing about Digg is that it went through enshittification long before it became the phrase to describe our current internet zeitgeist. It happened incredibly early in its life, but for reasons and in ways that would come to be emblematic of the current internet. The core reason is that the owners of the website were just looking to get out of the game with a pile of fast, easy cash ASAP. They were in talks with Google to sell Digg for $200 million in 2008, but that deal fell through.

The beginning of the end for Digg came in August of 2010, when the site went through a major redesign, referred to as "Digg v4," that fundamentally altered the ranking of posts on the site to heavily favor power users, as well as introducing a metric ton of bugs. It's hard to describe the feeling of waking up one day and have your favorite website totally, completely destroyed. It was a Frankensteinian abomination; a cruel, misshapen doppelganger of an aggregator that now mainly linked to advertisements thinly disguised as "user content" and content posted by literally a handful of users who were able to manipulate post rankings to exclude any and all posts from non-power users from the front page, driving traffic exclusively to where they wanted it. As many of these power users existed on the political spectrum somewhere between Libertarian and outright Fascists, the political content on the website became especially jarring. No boiling of frogs took place here like it did on Reddit. One single code deployment and server restart later and the website was unusable.

The complete catastrophe that was this redesign triggered a mass exodus from Digg to Reddit. Digg was never able to recover and Reddit became the de facto content aggregator site for the internet (and it's where I spent around 8 hours of every day from September of 2010 to some time in 2023 when they finally gutted the API and I moved to Lemmy). In a grand example of historical irony, Alexis Ohanian said, in an open letter to the founder of Digg, Kevin Rose,

this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It's cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to "give the power back to the people."

Eventually, Digg was gutted for spare parts and its components and miscellaneous intellectual property sold off piecemeal for a total sum that was less than 5% of the value of the initial deal with Google. And the website Digg itself was ultimately sold in April of 2018 to BuySellAds for an undisclosed, but almost certainly pathetic, sum.

And now, dear reader, you are aware of the sad and tragic history of Digg, whose rise and fall was an unheeded warning of the precipice towards which the internet as a whole is headed.

This thing is so technically complex and has so many moving parts that I can only imagine it breaking literally constantly and costing a fortune to repair whenever it does.

I don't know why you would think they're paid media or propaganda. It's not like they've been paid over half a million dollars in 2015 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Or like they received almost 3 million euros in 2022 by a "philanthropic" organization called Open Philanthropy that operates on the philosophical basis of "effective altruism," an ideology which functionally equates to "let's try to convince billionaires to throw some money at the poors instead of addressing systemic inequality," and which totally cool people like Sam Bankman-Fried and Elon Musk have latched onto as belief systems. It's also not like they've been given money by the conservative religious John Templeton Foundation, which was one of the largest financial contributors to the early climate change denial movement from 2003 to 2010.

Nope. Nothing to see here. Not in bed with big money or ideologically dubious organizations at all. /s

"Best I can do is a small fine. Also, the fine is tax deductible." - Federal Government, 2023.

American culture is, I believe, becoming more homogeneous over time as a result of information technology. Unless you're from either rural Appalachia or some deep part of the South, you just don't have an accent. Or rather, you have a generic "American" accent.

This feels like one of those situations where something is designed purely to absorb as much venture capital on the tiny, infinitesimally small chance it produces a viable product.

It would be so funny if America re-elected Trump after everything. Like, 4 years of tragic, all consuming incompetence, with millions dead from covid. A literal attempted coup after a lost election. And then after 4 years of a milquetoast geriatric Democrat, the country's like the kid who stuck a fork in the outlet to see what would happen and then a few days later thinks to himself "yeah, it fucking hurt like a sonofabitch last time, but this time if I use TWO forks, something different might happen."

Apple enthusiasts claim it's literally double the amount of RAM they need for their workload. They proceed to watch Netflix in a google chrome window where it's the only tab open on their 2500 dollar computer.

From a historical or intellectual archaeological perspective, no one in 2000 BC Babylon thought their pottery would be of historical significance, but 4000 years later, it is. These websites, particularly ones independently created and maintained by hobbyists, are snapshots of the ideas of the time and people that created them. These websites may not have been intensely popular, but they were in many ways a foundational part of the inchoate tapestry of the internet that would eventually become the "modern web."

If it’s not OSI approved then it’s not open source.

OSI as an organization did not invent the concept of Open Source software. They just appointed themselves the arbiters of the term. There are other organizations and individuals that disagree with their definition.

Well, that's perfect, because that's going to be [insert next calendar year here].

Yeah, it's really more about two massive industries colluding to extract additional income from working Americans. Rental agencies contract with Spectrum, get a cut off the top, and the renters are stuck with a shitty internet service they don't want. Honestly, renting has never been a great experience for the average American, but it's been getting worse over time. Rental agencies are starting to cut staff, reduce actual beneficial services offered, force renters into paying for additional junk services they don't want or need (what the fuck is a $50 a month "beautification fee," anyway? Nobody ever fucking cleans this place...), and, of course, increase rent every year. And they can do this because...what the fuck else are you going to do? If you're working class and live in a high cost of living area, you can't just move, or buy a house. You have to rent. No other options, really. And while you'd think "well, if someone else opens an apartment complex that offers better services, you can just move there." Sure, and spend 15 grand moving a mile and a half only to have the apartment complex you moved to suffer the same enshittification after 6 months that the first one did.

No one is asking you to leave.

At this point, I am wondering if maybe someone should be asking them to leave. I've interacted with this poster in other threads. I think they might be psychologically unwell and I also think that their primary purpose for interacting with Beehaw and, honestly, any other Lemmy instance is based around finding ways to antagonize site administration/moderation and complain about their (routinely off topic and incredibly opinionated) content being removed.

Actually, now that I think about it, a ban is probably exactly what they're fishing for.

Dead Internet Theory is one of the few "conspiracy" theories I sort of buy, in the sense that it's probably not descriptive of the nature of the current internet, but rather predictive of what it's becoming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

And also with less of the whole "they're doing this to manipulate people into believing...things" and more "people want quick and superficial information so that's all that's being produced and since it's easier for machines to produce it than humans, humans will automatically get outcompeted and eventually that's all the internet will be." The internet is becoming a dead mall, filled with the corpses of long abandoned Hot Topics.

The thing is that you probably won't find anything that looks too closely at the efficacy of the claims, because the claims are all that anything is reporting on, since the product is so new. Here is a similar article published on asme.org (American Society of Mechanical Engineers), that discusses the buoys and the company's claims surrounding them: https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/tapping-the-ocean

Deadlock sounds like the name of a no-budget indie horror game that would release on Steam for a dollar. Not a big budget Apexwatch or Overlegends or....whatever you call this style of game.

You can find the indictment online at the link posted above. It goes pretty deep into how the prosecutors understand anarchism. There's definitely an ideological bent to the prosecution, but the things they're being indicted over are arson, destruction of private property, and a host of illegal means of preventing the construction of Cop City. Still...the prosecution is clearly extremely concerned with misrepresenting anarchism as a political ideology.

there isn’t enough content on Lemmy to only whitelist certain communities

This is really the central problem. There's way fewer posts on any given Lemmy/fediverse network compared to the major players, and I've been conditioned by the last 13 years I spent on reddit to have constant interactive stimuli and discussion based on my interests. That doesn't exist here because the communities are so small. Admittedly, yeah, I could post. But I've always been a commenter on existing discussions, not someone who wants to start the discussions myself.

I know this is my "old man yells at clouds" take, but young people especially are so socially and economically progressive while being so remarkably puritanical. Like, you could have a movie about sex workers and the same people that praise it for representation would unironically complain if it (god forbid) had any nudity.

people are only against it from years of religious based shame

I don't think that's really it in a contemporary perspective. During the 20th century, sure, but young people don't really go to church or unironically consume Christian ideological rhetoric en masse. I think a lot of it has to do with how mass media is structured, built, and presented today. Everything has been boiled down to the most formulaic and family friendly fare imaginable, so people just don't see sex, nudity, or physical intimacy presented in the media they consume. That's not something "fit for all audiences," which means it reduces the number of people they can sell it to. You see the same thing with places like reddit that have been slowly cracking down on and removing NSFW subreddits for years. I mean, it's great if you're asexual. But for everyone else? It sorta ghettoizes the idea of physical intimacy.

I remember watching Red vs. Blue back before it was even on Youtube. Fuck I'm old. That was the era of the internet that, for me, was at its best. Before everything became a collection of solidified super services and people made shows by just moving a character model in Halo around. As others have said, the true end of an era. Also RIP to Monty Oum. Man was an auteur. Horny weirdo, too, but also an auteur.

The odds of that are so incredibly low. DE is a fantastic standalone game. Arguably one of the most artistically complex and rich games ever made, and it stands alone perfectly well. It raised the bar for gaming in a way that others have aspired to but not ever really reached. The best we can hope for is that the makers of the game can make a new game in the future. One whose IP they know how to protect, this time.

I love how reality manages to combine the most comically exploitative parts of cyberpunk fiction with literally none of the intense, vibrant, or interesting parts. It's just a dull, gray, sexless, post-industrial dystopia with ugly cars, chronic obesity, and fentanyl addiction. And now surge pricing.

I think part of the reason the word has caught on so much recently, especially in 2023, is that we are fully in a new era that I like to call the "solid internet." The internet as a predominately web and mobile accessible media and social media landscape emerged after 2010, and for about 10 years continued to grow and evolve. I remember fleeing to reddit after Digg died (see the original famous case of enshittification). At the time, the internet was far more fluid. Facebook was popular, certainly, and Twitter was gaining in steam. YouTube was the de facto video hosting platform, but it still had some degree of nominal competition. Same with reddit as a content aggregator. The monoliths of the modern internet were growing, but still rising in popularity. And they were good. Better than anything we'd had before. Easier to access than usenet, but still strange and spontaneous and ever evolving. A brave new world, filled with brave new people (as well as a shitload of racism, homophobia, porn, and gore). This is a period I call the "fluid internet." As of 2023, the internet has solidified and congealed around the current monolithic services as we know them. And now that competition is dead, they get to squeeze - they get to set prices, block VPN connections and unpaid API access, ban problematic or dissenting content, and create a truly corporatized, milquetoast experience - something that caters to everyone, but truly appeals to no one. Like the world's dullest theme park.

The one thing that Cory Doctorow was wrong about in his definition of enshittification is that the final step is that a platform dies. Platforms used to die when they enshittified in the fluid internet, because competition existed and people would throw venture capital at plucky startups. But the reality is that we live in a post-competition world, and people are less adventurous and more "on rails" in how they expect to engage with the internet than they used to be. Google will continue to get worse, but it's still going to be the de facto search mechanism here on out. Same for videos and YouTube. Because that's what people use now and there are no other options. There's not going to be some "hot new platform" that pulls the rug out from under YouTube as a video hosting solution. And if you think the Fediverse and its various alternatives is going to ever be anything other than a niche microcosm of the internet, you're dreaming.

This is it. This is the internet we wanted, I guess, because this is what we made for ourselves, with the only thing to look forward to is it getting worse with time. Eventually Valve will go public at some point in the future and its marketplace will become horrible. Eventually Firefox will shutter its doors and if you want to access a web page, you're going to have to sign a blood contract with Google for use of a chromium browser. I imagine there will come a day when I don't even really use the internet anymore because it'll be so terrible and unrecognizable to me.

That's probably what the VM is doing: it's self-hosting a server running timemachined. timemachined itself is actually running out of a docker container that's running on the VM, but that's because by 2033 every single update, which occur daily, breaks the existing docker installation on a Mac. Which is honestly very similar to what happens in 2023, except it's every other day currently.

There's a lot of "older" rappers that aren't really with the times and you'll see them releasing music that is explicitly complaining about "cancel culture," even though they're not victims of it and are still very successful. I used to be a pretty big Run the Jewels/Killer Mike fan, but the track "Talk'n That Shit!" from his 2023 album, Michael, is just generically mean and kinda hateful, with lyrics like

***** talk to me about that woke-ass shit (yeah)

Same ***** walkin' on some broke-ass shit

You see, your words ain't worth no money, I ain't spoke back, bitch

All of you ***** hang together on some Brokeback shit

I'll let you fill in the blanks or look up the lyrics yourself, because I'm not looking to catch a ban from posting rap lyrics, but needless to say it's just "fuck you woke people, you're all gay." Like, there's very little artistic merit to a song like that.

Dude used to write music that punched up, but then he went on NRA TV and talked about how he would kick his kids out of the house if they ever protested in favor of gun control legislation (he's a huge 2nd Amendment advocate) and now he's suddenly "anti-woke" because a bunch of people on Twitter told him he was out of touch and closed-minded and that if he really wanted to deliver this particular message, he probably could have selected a platform less comically heinous than one almost exclusively watched by alt-right lunatics. So he decided to prove them wrong by being even more out of touch and closed-minded.

American corporations want an "easy" war. Like against a country like Iraq or Afghanistan. You know, someone that has no real capacity to fight back or strike foreign military targets (like a Lockheed martin manufacturing facility) and is more of a punching bag for the US military. A war with China would immediately spark World War 3 and trigger a global economic and military crisis. It is also extremely undesirable because China is a nuclear superpower and, uh...we tend not to get into shooting wars with those because they can potentially escalate into literal nuclear holocaust.

So if I have my laptop in bed at night and then close the laptop lid to go to sleep and wake up, the reason the battery is fucking dead is because the laptop never actually "sleeps" - it just enters a lower power state while still draining battery relatively aggressively?

I'm gonna have to argue against a few of these points:

When you enter the Apple ecosystem you basically sign a contract with them : they sell you overpriced goods, but in exchange you get a consistent, coherent and well thought-out experience across the board.

Consistent: yes. Every Apple device leverages a functionally very similar UI. That said, the experience is, in my opinion, not very coherent or well thought out. Especially if you are attempting to leverage their technology from the standpoint of someone like a Linux power user. The default user experience is frustratingly warped around the idea that the end user is an idiot who has no idea how to use a terminal and who only wants access to the default applications provided with the OS.

Things work well

Things work...okay. But try installing, uninstalling, and then reinstalling a MySQL DB on a macbook and then spend an hour figuring out why your installation is broken. Admittedly, that's because you're probably installing it with Homebrew, but that's the other point: if you want to do anything of value on it, you have to use a third party application like Homebrew to do it. The fact that you have to install and leverage a third party package manager is unhinged for an ecosystem where everything is so "bundled" together by default.

Of course you there’s a price to pay. Overpriced products, limited UI/UX options, no interoperability, little control over your data. And when there’s that one thing that doesn’t work, no luck. But your day to day life within the Apple ecosystem IS enjoyable. It’s a nice golden cage with soft pillows.

I guess the ultimate perspective is one in which you have to be happy surrendering control over so much to Apple. But then again, you could also just install EndeavorOS with KDE Plasma or any given flavor of Debian distribution with any DE of your choice, install KDE Connect on your PC and phone, and get 95 percent of the experience Apple offers right out of the box, with about 100x the control over your system.

I used to be a hardcore PC/Linux/Android user. Over the last few years I gradually switched to a full Apple environment : MacBook, iPhone, iPad… I just don’t have time to “manage” my hardware anymore.

I don't know of anyone who would describe themselves as a hardcore "PC/Linux user," or what this means to you. I'm assuming by PC you mean Windows. But people who are really into Linux generally don't like MacOS or Windows, and typically for all the same reasons. I tolerate a Windows machine for video game purposes, but if I had to use it for work I'd immediately install Virtualbox and work out of a Linux VM. For the people who are really into Linux, the management of the different parts of it is, while sometimes a pain in the ass, also part of the fun. It's the innate challenge of something that can only be mastered by technical proficiency. If that's not for you, totally fine.

The whole “special club” argument is bullshit, and I hope we grow out of it.

It's less argument and more of a general negative sentiment people hold towards Apple product advocates. You can look up the phenomenon of "green bubble discrimination." It's a vicious cycle in which the ecosystem works seamlessly for people who are a part of it, but Apple intentionally makes leaving that ecosystem difficult and intentionally draws attention to those who interact with the people inside of it who are not part of it. Apple products also often are associated with a higher price tag: they're status symbols as much as they are functional tools. People recognize a 2000 dollar Macbook instantly. Only a few people might recognize a comparably priced Thinkpad. In a lot of cases, they'll just assume the Macbook was expensive and the non-Macbook was cheap. And you might say, "yeah, but that's because of people, not because of Mac." But it would be a lie to say that Apple isn't a company intensely invested in brand recognition and that it doesn't know it actively profits from these perceptions.

He doesnt believe his employees need a union because I dont know about you but if I owned a company Id hope that my people felt looked after well enough that they didnt feel like they needed one either.

If I owned my own company I would DEMAND my employees unionize. You can never trust your boss to have your back. Especially when your boss is me. Because I know me, and I suck.

One thing I will never be sorry to see go is the age of pathetic power users who steal content from others and repost it ad nauseam for their own social network capital. Because those people are getting out competed by AI, who are stealing stories from those users, as well as stories posted by other AI. And thank you, writing is a small hobby of mine.

The concept of the Deep South, a geographical region historically associated with bigotry, injustice, ignorance, poverty, etc., in an American context is simply non-existent in an Australian one. As such, the irony of that name doesn't really apply outside of the United States.

I can only assume the reason you'd work for Disney as either an engineer or technician is if you have a kink involving being in a constant and inescapable state of overworked frustration.