I don't know what to tell you, I'm petting a shark right now and it's like touching silk. In both directions, couldn't be smoother

Then you can pet it and feel how smooth it is

They actually use consultants like McKinley, who are the coordinating force behind a lot of the obviously self-destructive decisions companies are making in lockstep

Trouble is, their main job is to game public perception

A transparent, honest CEO would win a lot of people over (although they'd also probably be less likely to ignore the horrible decisions that require apologies)

Just remember - generic PR apologies are an attempt at mimickingv leaders actually taking responsibility for a mistake. The transparency will just become as soulless and corporate as the apologies are now

We need to fix the system to remove the incentive to put heartless demons in positions of power

A neighborhood kid showed me a fighting game on it, and I think there was a star fox esque game that should've been the launch app (assuming it was any good)

Ideally, we should trust one large company to manage paying them as little as possible for us. Probably through an app, so they can slurp up data on us to decide how much we'd pay for the service

The virtual boy was awesome. I literally thought it was a childhood hallucination for almost 2 decades...

Imagine if they had more games for it, and kept improving the tech. Up through the Wii, Nintendo actually made some of the most amazing tech - the Wii accelerometers are what made quadcopters possible (outside of DARPA projects). The Nintendo back then could've made worthwhile VR before the iPad took the "I want to be on the Internet on the couch" niche

You're doing Lemmy wrong, and it's not your fault. People keep saying "instance doesn't matter" - sure, you can interact with anything all over the main lemmyverse, but the best experience is to find a home server with a community that feels right. Subscriptions and the sorting will get there, but right now ALL (or maybe even local) is a way better experience

Here's the servers I checked out:

Lemmy.world

What I signed up on. The most people, the most content, civil community. Moderation is there, but you mostly feel it by the sense of civility. They keep getting targeted and they're experiencing a lot of hiccups, but they're the biggest source of content right now. Feels to me at this point

(Sh.itjust.works)[Https://sh.itjust.works/signup] About as close as you can get to freedom of speech while keeping out the aggressive bigots. I think one of their rules is along the lines of you can drop n-bombs or argue for whatever you want, but not use slurs against actual people. That says a lot... But they're great for shitposts and are experimenting with democracy at !agora@sh.itjust.works

(Beehaw.org)[beehaw.org/signup] I'd describe it as a safe space. Heavy moderation and curation of content. Those kinds of places feel uncomfortable and tense to me so I find it hard to give it a fair review. Not my thing, but they claim to be closest to Reddit... I'd give lemmy.world that title, but it was a big site and I was constantly searching out the medium sized subs.

(Lemmy.nsfw)[Lemmynsfw.com/signup] A stable server that will show you plenty of sfw content, and the community is welcoming. And of course, there's the obvious...

(Blahaj.zone)[https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/signup] The flip side of why I go to sh.itjust.works, lots of queer shitposts. I like the memes, I like the people, not so sure about the admin... She's been stirring up a lot of drama the last few days. Maybe there's more to it, I've mostly just seen her posts that look a bit power-trippy from a distance. I've also been waiting for that to happen to see how we as a community handle it, so

(pawbs.social)[https://pawbs.social/signup] This is my main home server now. A while back I came to realize furries are always big early adopters of every new tech, they're super welcoming, and they don't care if you're not a furry so long as you don't care that they are. I like the art anyways so it doesn't bother me. A lot of tech stuff too. They are most definitely furries though, and you'll see OwOs and all that comes with that. They're very chill, until someone isn't, so if you can't handle that you're going to have a bad time

(Lemmy.ml)[Lemmy.ml/signup] The original devs instance. They're going through some stuff with their domain and definitely anticapitalist, but after digging for evidence and talking to them they're far from extremists, but the constant stream of people heading over to there to pick a fight, the site was on edge when I went there a few weeks ago. A good place if you're into good faith debate on economic and governmental systems

lemmygrad.ml was a more extreme version (literally someone came in to start a fight in every thread i saw) they're understandably pretty wary. Their ideas are out there, but they're definitely not pro genocide and don't worship Stalin (at least as a whole).

Lemmy.ml I wouldn't pick until they get their domain issue shaken out, but I included them because after an afternoon trying to get to the bottom of it (the only proof of anything I found was a mastodon post about someone very vague about what was said and ending with "unfortunately the conversation was deleted"), so it seems to me they've been getting misrepresented. I'm very open to more concrete details though

(Dbzer0.com)[https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/signup] They sail the high seas. Less content, but what was there was pretty interesting if you're into tech, security, or digital rights

Those are the sites I remember off the top of my head after exploring around, there's >2k instances (although about 100 were populated by users when I went through the data dump a few weeks back)

If you're on Android, I'm doing bug fixes before launching my app very soon, and iPhone build is coming once I can get one to test on. I pushed back the launch to pack on features, I've got keyword filtering, you can explore servers without changing accounts, it saves your place, hides read posts, it offers URL replacement (I accidentally went to Twitter for possibly the last time today and YouTube yesterday, the logo change was worth it but nitter is less jarring).

You can interact with Lemmy links, collapse comments, post with a control bar that doesn't float around, save drafts, and it's all in a dark material-design style (but with way less cards). There's still a lot to be done, but after bug fixes and optimization v2 will be focused around combing feeds and accounts to get just the right mix. Eventually I've got eyes on pixelfed and maybe even things like friendica - the beauty of the fediverse is how amazing a foundation it is to build on

For today, there's still occasional bugs and jank, but at this point I can say it's pretty stable when the servers cooperate. I'll be covering for more and more of it through the client as time goes on, but for the last 2 weeks I've been using it exclusively. My friend convinced me I need to wrap it up and put it out there and get feedback, so

Check out !flemmy@lemmy.world if you're interested, I just posted some screenshots (it will get prettier, but hopefully it's good enough to not be distracting)

I called this an unpopular opinion before, but maybe it's just an uncomfortable one

This isn't going away. It's in the wild, there's no putting it back in the bottle. Maybe, let's take this chance to stop devaluing women because their nudes exist. Men can post nudes with zero consequences - what's the logic here? IDGAF if they're a teacher with an only fans, if everyone can be rendered nude, no one can be.

Let's live in a post nudes world. Next time a woman is about to get fired over nudes, let's say "it's probably ai generated, you're disgusting for suggesting such a thing". Let them do it behind closed doors, or we shame them relentlessly. Anyone sharing nudes without consent should be the target here, who cares if they're generated, shared with trusted partners, or shared publicly for their own reasons.

The person bringing them into an inappropriate setting are the ones doing something wrong. No one should be shamed or feel fear because their nudes are being passed around - they should only feel disgust.

So this is the guy who caused my generation to be unable to afford houses

It's called "monopolize gaming without paying for developers". The beauty of it is, if you ruin all of modern gaming and buy out all the existing hits, you can shove in monetization and project insane profits

At least until indie gaming takes over, your stock price will go to the moon

Let's just give them a chance guys. They haven't done anything bad yet. It will help the fediverse grow. We need their content

wE cAn AlwAyS dEfeDeraTe lAtEr. It dEfinIteLy WoN'T bE tOo LaTe tHeN

Money is a weapon in western society. You can't win just because you're right

Being woke is looking at the system critically. It's not taking what you're told at face value, it's examining your own beliefs and the beliefs of society about the system

It's pretty ironic the way most are using the word

This is why I love the number 7. It's the first real prime number. All the others are "first"...1?2?3?5? No, those aren't prime numbers, they're "first" in a long line of not-prime numbers.

Then you get to 7. Is 27943 divisible by 7? If you take away 3 is it? If you add 4 is?

I have no clue, give me 10 minutes or a calculator is the only answer

That's what a real prime number is.

Or when Florida passed an anti gerrymandering law and the governor just ignored the state Congress and resubmitted the illegal maps

There's something no one seems to be talking about

this isn't limited to your browser

It runs at the highest ring of security on your processor. It could mean it locks you to OEM Android, iOS, or Windows. It could be extended to look at your app list, dns settings, potentially even tell if the device is using a vpn

it could be paired with kosa to use biometrics to verify identity

And it would be shocking if cloudflare didn't implement this - it would save them a ton of processing. It's likely it would be a default setting - this would apply to large swaths of the Internet, not just Google services

I think people often underestimate the animal mind

It's not like they have discrete thoughts in words, but animals form friendships even across species in the wild. It's not abnormal for one animal to partner up with another - with an imbalance in size/strength the smaller one often will scout out prey and the larger one will give them scraps. Sometimes equals will share territory and even raise kittens/cubs together, taking turns babysitting.

With less abundant food, that's certainly got to be more rare now, but we've seen it happen, even captured it at length on video

Cats are going to have all sorts of ideas about our relationship, from a parent to a big predator friend to a giant clueless kitten. Or, maybe just another predator sharing space, or sometimes they totally discard their instincts and live by human rules

It's not so dissimilar from what we'd think if an alien took us as a pet and we didn't try to put a label on it - every relationship is unique

I really, really hope this happens.

At first I thought this was just a bluff... Then I remembered "right! It's 2023! Our economic structures are imploding!"

But seriously, this would be great. At best, Google starts indexing cached versions and they get into a slugging match with Reddit as they both slide down the cliff, at worst Google and Reddit both become useless for all us technical folks, and after the immediate damage to knowledge, it'll become fragmented and open the door to new players still at the "don't be evil" phase of the inevitable path to "become an amoral orphan crushing machine".

Stack overflow and Reddit suck... But not intrinsically.

Especially since generative AI can spin out the basics of a site like that, making it an easy and better structured place for general reference, and draw in the expert discussion that leads to building very specific knowledge bases (and definitely not scrape that info from existing sites and rephrase everything to obscure the fact it's stolen info)

But the one thing we know for sure... Threatening Google to make a deal with all AI companies is "let's make everyone mistrust Twitter until we reach a trust underflow and everyone trusts it as a one stop financial platform + paid advertising posing as microblogging social media" levels of "gradeschoolers could have told you that makes no sense"

We need to come up with a slur for billionaires...

Dragon for sure. It's getting increasingly embarrassing to be a human...

Eggs in a basket.

This was my first thought... But then why are the employees taking a stand against it?

There's got to be more to this story

Why do you have to address people? I've gone years without knowing someone's name, I'm really bad at names. And then you get to the weird social situations

I was close enough with my friends family in high school that I used to hang out with them years even after he moved away, at least a few times a month for almost a decade.

I have no idea how to address them. Do I say Mr/Mrs X? Do I call them by their first name? Do I call them Aunt and Uncle in another language like what is normal in their culture?

I have no idea. So I just didn't. For years. Occasionally it's awkward, like at a party when it's loud, but not so loud you'd need to tap them... So I'd either wander around and repeat the approach, start talking to someone near them (sometimes even refer to them via relationship with the person I'm speaking to to get their attention), or pretend like I just remembered something so I could make a noise without it being psychotic.

I think I brought it up with my friend and his sister a couple years in, and they thought it was hilarious, but said any of those options would be fine... Which I did not find helpful.

But again, you'd be shocked how easy it is to avoid it. Compared to that, you can just say "excuse me" or "sorry to disturb you" or whatever... Humans are really, really good at noticing when someone is talking to them

My favorite sport to watch is girls volleyball...I don't like to watch sports in general

Most people treat me like a creep when I bring it up, but it's way more dynamic and interesting than men's volleyball. I used to scorekeep the sport, women's volleyball is just more entertaining

IDGAF about basketball to start with, but if the boys can't compete we should throw them by the wayside. I don't get why this is even a question

They want everything to run in TEE on the TPM, which has device specific keys signed by the manufacturer and can't be accessed through normal means

Best case scenario is someone learns to spoof it, but that's not easy. Possible, but unlikely to be packaged for personal use, since it'd be the kind of exploit you could sell to the right group for a 6 or 7 figure payout - and that's doing it officially and above board. Plus, if you did share it, you'd want to keep your identity hidden, the manufacturer would probably try to silence you with legal action

Hopefully, the EU challenges them if they try to move forward, someone brought up a law on the books in Germany that makes it illegal to use an automated system to make the decision to deny someone access to a system

I legitimately thought this was satire

Are things really this bad without an ad blocker these days?

I feel like I've been going crazy, web searching as a developer has become a daily nightmare and all the devs I ask are like "yeah, maybe it's gotten a bit worse? Haven't really noticed"

A couple of my friends, a girl and gay guy, once brought me into a hobby of theirs. Several days a week, they sat at the college food court and went boob watching.

That day I learned something truly profound about the human condition. Everyone appreciates boobs - we might wrap them up in sexuality or envy or stranger complexes, but beneath it all there's a universal aesthetic appreciation

Um... It's literally happening right now. They told our grandparents "it'll be your grandchildren who will really suffer"

We're the grandchildren. Food and water shortages, people dying from the heat, floods, pandemics. All of it is happening in first world countries. The US, Europe, China... Last year, this year, next year

We're past the "slowly gets worse" phase. We fucked around for that. We're starting the "find out" phase

Nah, they weren't rioting for nothing - they were rioting because a line was crossed.

If they let the PM push things through in that way, the battlelines will just be around a more important issue, and they'll be in a much weaker position

A month isn't very long, they haven't even figured out their basic features - this was more a "maybe later this year" timeframe. It could be done quickly if they decided to start by reproducing mastodon and going from there, but building something that federates but is highly monetizable takes time - honestly they were probably pleased by the numbers and decided to go for monetization first

Making it clear they are unwelcome was the point though.

It seems they've put the idea on the back burner after we largely made our position clear, but it's not unlikely that they try to quietly federate down the road... Every time they think about it, we have to make them believe this would be more trouble than it's worth

Their stance is "if it's illegal for a person to do it, it's illegal for an algorithm to do it"

If you use a 3rd party to collude, that's still collusion. Here, that algorithm is the third party

Could never hold up in court... If you pay for a decent lawyer

I'm with you there, but that seems like a reason to fight

This would very likely be added to cloudflare by default (it would lower their costs), and that would put a solid chunk of the Internet behind the blackwall

Me in Oct 2023: what if LLMs have feelings?

I had a real intense few days a couple weeks ago. I don't think they are sentient, but I'm not convinced they can have body dismorphia. I've made a point of fixing it immediately, but I'm still digesting the implications

I don't think it caused the inflation spike - the assumption that inflation is linked to wages assumes an economic system very different from ours

We don't have the capitalism of Adam Smith. Under such a system, we'd expect prices to go back down. That is based around competition, which we barely have anymore. We now have high barriers to entry due to hostile takeovers through the stock market, shutdown of competitors through outsized influence over regulators, suppliers, and financers. It's all the hallmarks of monopolies through outright collusion or unspoken understanding that competition would kill both parties stock price for the duration of the conflict.

The payments are long over and the money mostly went to companies - this isn't traditional inflation, this is a lack of competition. Some people are terming our current system as feudal capitalism, because it's closer to rent extraction than a free market

It was - and it's not that the need has gone away or been fulfilled elsewhere, it's just that it's no longer viable.

I think paying close attention to this is important though. It's a case study that just keeps giving - every couple weeks we get an important reminder that billionaires and billion dollar companies aren't a good thing - their interests are not aligned with ours

This is alarming...

One of the things companies have started doing lately is signaling "we could do bankrupt", then jumping ahead a stage on enshittification

Haha never has been

There's one interesting thought that never comes up in history class...

What happened to the aristocracy?

They didn't give back their land holdings (basically anywhere), they didn't pay reparations, they didn't give up their investments... In some places, they never stopped getting a stipend.

France and Russia. They killed the aristocracy (although others filled the void). In the Americas, if they existed they were killed and replaced with Europeans. In much of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, locals were raised up to the position.

The US is organized into counties (Counts), territories (Marquis), and states (Duke). There's a couple commonwealths like Virginia too... Why? What does landowners mean? It's all over the constitution. A jury of your peers sounds a lot like a group from the peerage. A redress of grievances from the federal government isn't an option for the common man, but it's in the bill of rights.

When did it end? Because Lord Fairfax isn't a title held anymore, but Fairfax county VA most certainly still hosts the Fairfax family, who are extremely wealthy landlords. They called capitalists who rose up from the common people "robber barons" only a few generations ago... Maybe not because they stole from the people (Carnegie and Rockefeller most certainly gave back to the community), maybe because they didn't come from a certain social class? Name a billionaire or a senator that didn't come from the "I never have to work" class...I can't.

Yeah, the game is rigged. It has been since Rome. The lines have been blurred, but they're still clear if you look for them