deweydecibel

I’d argue the front ends should also provide users ways to see a more complete, instance-agnostic version of Lemmy. Like the first thing a user should see when they show up is just…Lemmy. not a page that suggests instances and all kinds of other things that they’re not going to understand.

Part of what made Reddit work is that it was a shared site, a shared hub, and every user saw the same thing depending on what they were subscribed to. I get that certain instance admins have problems with other instances, and I get that they might defederate from some for legal or security reasons. I know they also might police their servers for content and comments they don’t feel “fit”, and that’s their right.

But ultimately I don’t believe the user’s experience should suffer for that. If admins don’t want to host certain content on their servers, fine. I think that’s where the front ends and apps should come in.

Provide ways of unifying the experience of different user accounts on different instances into something more…well, unified. I don’t believe I should have to care about what instance I’m looking at Lemmy “from”, I should just be able to see the whole thing based on what I’ve subscribed to.

I know that’s a very complicated suggestion, and it might involve a lot of redundancies and crossed wires, and how the moderation would look is definitely a discussion (maybe a drop down list “see this community as moderated by ______”?)

But genuinely I think if an app can achieve something like this, it would go a long way towards making the experience more universal and attractive for an audience looking to come from elsewhere. They do not care about decentralization or instances, and we can’t make them care by lecturing them. So we do the next best thing and create a sort of facsimile of centralization.

My Jellyfin is also running media from recycled HDDs from work. No where near this impressive haul, but it was nice to be able to get a solid 10 TBs for free to get my server going.

It’s not even just about the fact that it’s going to wreck those agencies, it also means that there will be substantially less whistle-blowing, and there will be virtually no one working for the government who will raise an alarm or put a stop to anything. When everybody is on board, that creates a substantial amount of power for the executive branch.

What makes it so frightening is that the discussion starts to slide away from the actual functioning of our democratic system and the workings of the executive branch, and starts getting into matters of where power is derived from in a government.

What we have seen is that our Congress is infected by too many friends of fascism, if not fascist themselves. Unless the Democrats have a supermajority in both chambers, Republicans can successfully derail every single thing Congress ever tries to do to reign in an executive branch that’s out of control. Trump was impeached twice, and painfully, obviously guilty both times, and nothing happened because the system has been so fundamentally broken.

Knowing now that Congress can do nothing to stop him, and of course knowing that the court system is captured at this point, Trump will be completely and utterly unafraid of doing anything. The systems in place that would protect us from a renegade executive office will fail to stop him.

Having the entire executive, and every seat in every department filled with loyalists, with nothing in his way that can effectively stop it, is basically a precursor to dictatorship.

Aside: when I can no longer download videos to avoid ads, I’ll stop watching YouTube videos.

Why do people keep saying this like it’s a “fuck you”? They know, and they don’t care. If you’re not watching the ads or paying for the subscription, they don’t give a damn what you do.

I mean, I agree with the sentiment, but the way people keep spitting these words out with such spite and aggression is just funny to me.

“If you stop me from watching YouTube, I’m going to stop watching YouTube. I’m fucking serious.”

They said they are an iOS/Mac person.

Which is also hilarious because they linked paid software as a method of getting around YouTube ads.

Someday, a large corporation is going to finally figure out that firing the people who make their products work results in shitty products no one buys.

The problem is, this isn’t true. The first part certainly is, though many companies are perfectly capable of making shitty products no matter how many employees they have.

The second part though? I would certainly like to believe that, but it’s simply not what happens, especially when it comes to apps and services like Spotify. A huge part of why so much in the tech industry is just absolute ass now is because users are unwilling to try alternatives. Vendor lock in tactics have succeeded, but the average consumer is just lazy and complacent too.

The user experience of Spotify has been dropping dramatically for years. They haven’t lost any users. They have boiled one of the most well cooked frogs in the entire tech industry. And even if you they have a significant portion of users who do actively complain about it, they probably can’t even name an alternative streaming service besides maybe Apple music, and there’s certainly not tech literate enough to understand that you can transfer your library and playlists to another streaming service really easily.

I’ve legitimately explained this to multiple people I know personally who are incredibly frustrated with spotify, and all of them reacted the same way: at the slightest suggestion of putting in a little bit of effort to move away from the platform that they despise, their resolved disappears.

And it’s exactly that mentality, widespread, across so many industries, that allows CEOs to get away with shit like this. They are never punished when consumers are so unwilling to change their habits.

The app or frontend you’re using you’re using is probably smart enough to ignore the period at the end of the link

Well, the weird thing is they haven’t actually done anything to the app yet. Looks like they’re just focusing on the next major release. The version that has been available in the store for the last 2 years hasn’t been fucked with.

If you’re still using Nova 7, it’s fine. If you installed the beta for version 8, that’s the one they’ve been working on after the buyout.

Not yet. Nova Launcher 8 is the problem version and it’s still in beta. If you’re still using version 7, particularly 7.0.57, then it’s the version from before the buyout and it’s clean. It’s suspected they turned some analytics on with 7.0.58, but even that still looks clean to me. That is the only update they’ve pushed since the buyout.

My guess is they didn’t want to fuck with the current version, they just wanted to devote their focus to getting all the tracking shit into the upcoming major release.

If you disable auto updates now, you’ll probably be fine until it stops working

The only thing that might be close, though not directly, is translation software (kanji be hard).

Well that’s the dirty little open secret, isn’t it? These “AI” programs are just beefier versions of the same kinds of translation, predictive text, “smart” image editing, and chatbot software we’ve had for a while. Significantly more sophisticated and more powerful, but not exactly new. That’s why “AI” is suddenly appearing everywhere: in many cases, a less sophisticated predecessor of it was already there, they just didn’t use the marketing language OpenAI popularized.

I legit had a spelling and grammar checking add-on that rebranded itself to “AI”, and it did absolutely nothing different than what it already did.

And the whole point is that absolutely none of this is “AI” in any meaningful way. It’s like when that company tried to brand their new skateboard/segway things from a few years ago as “hoverboards”. You didn’t achieve the thing, you’re just reducing what the term means to make it apply to your new thing.

I’m suddenly thankful my business casual attire can be picked up for like 5 bucks at goodwill.

Hell, for my promotion to my first office job, my previous manager straight up bought me a bunch of cheap polos on his own dollar, basically saying “don’t embarrass me for suggesting you for the position”. Wore those for like a whole year or more before buying my own for cheap.

A full suit? Fuck. Good luck thrifting one that fits well without tailoring, if you can even find matching jacket and pants, let alone several.

They don’t actually know. If they think something looks suspicious, they do an audit, and then they know.

The vast majority of people’s taxes fillings are taken on good faith.

Except the federal government literally this year started instituting a free, public filling service to get around TurboTax. And they fought it tooth and nail.

There is a conspiracy, but it’s not a federal government conspiracy. It’s just a bad system that certain companies conspired to take advantage of.

It’s the selling part that got him.

For the frescos that must stay in position, a plaster glue is injected to their rear to prevent them coming away from the walls. Masonry is being shored up with scaffolding and temporary roofing is going over the top.

I’d be willing to bet they’d rather have not been killed by a volcano at all than be remembered.

Urban dictionary only works when the people using the terms go there to define them and upvoted the definitions.

And young people nowadays don’t do anything online if it isn’t an app.

The whole country?

Why are they afraid of saying “Netanyahu”?

I think it more likely that over time, after threads has captured enough of the user base fleeing Twitter and other social media platforms, threads will start pushing a sub-fediverse of sorts that will involve most of the major fediverse platforms, i.e. the ones run by people who attend the get togethers Meta invites them to. Slowly but surely that will be cemented as the primary “section” of the fediverse, “the Meta-fediverse”, and in order to join it, you’ll have to commit to their standards. And just like that, the decentralized platform has become centralized.

They’re willing to play with all the kids on the playground right now, but that will change. It’s bizarre to me that the fediverse has such a strong population of left-leaning users, that all came here spitting on the capitalist-poisoned platforms they fled, and yet somehow there are so many people around here that don’t see the danger of letting Meta in. They will find a way to fuck all of this up.

Committing to the idea of the fediverse will not benefit their bottom line in the long run. It is antithetical to the platform dominance that creates their profits.