Kinda what I meant by plastics

I’m more worried about the plastic, pesticides, degraded pharmaceuticals and heavy metals myself

I like the game grumps and Lex Fridman. The documentaries are cool, but I have to watch them in a different container or YouTube will start feeding me 30 minute ads or rants that sound reasonable but are super bigoted and flawed when you actually think about it

Reddit meant more to me than anything else I do online, and I committed to leaving it behind even before I found Lemmy… YouTube is barely worth it even without the ads. And I’ve got a whole fediverse of video content to investigate

That’s the advice CorgySkog gave them lol

Delete your history and be very selective in what you watch, and YouTube is pretty decent… At least for a few months. After that, either you stuck to your preferences and end up looping over the same content, or you branched out and now it keeps trying to feed you rants full of dog whistles

I use Firefox and containers along with unlock origin - by using the containers strictly for several narrow interests, YouTube acts like ad free tv for me - perfect background noise

I liked GTA V, but I spent my whole time with rdr2 just being like “everyone loves this game, what am I missing? Maybe if I make it to the next act it’ll open up more”.

It was beautiful, the world felt alive, the mechanics were good, but it’s like instead of making a game with the wonderful foundation they built, they decided they’d rather tell a story than make a game.

I loved the hunting, the bounty quests were kind of ok, the gunfights were ok even if they were so repetitive they felt procedural, but I just couldn’t care about the story they shoved down your throat.

I wanted to build up the settlement and have to run around robbing trains to come up with money, I don’t want to do a 5 minute ride while the characters give exposition through dialogue, fight a few waves of enemies, then ride off - rinse and repeat.

I wanted to grind progression through upgrading weapons and gear, but the upgrades are minimal, new guns are linked to story progression, and while hunting was fun the legendaries were just tedious jumping through hoops

I mean the reason people believe that is because it’s a very explicit language. It knows what’s in its memory at all times, and so at the lower layers it’s more secure by nature.

As opposed to php, you’re less likely to introduce a vulnerability by being sloppy with data sanitation - the language demands you tell it exactly the data structures you want it to put into memory. For that reason, the language is more secure - the parse json function is going to be less likely to be able to run rogue code maliciously embedded inside it than php, and if it does manage to do so, it’s easier to write php to blindly open a hole in the system from inside an interpreter than it is to break out of or hijack the runtime.

Obviously that doesn’t make it secure. It just means that all else being equal, rust is less vulnerable to a sloppy mistake at any given layer in the stack. Doesn’t mean you can’t make a logical mistake and open up a glaring security hole

And obviously you can write bulletproof php code, but every layer of the stack needs to be just as bulletproof. Including the interpreter and all your libraries - which historically were very much not bulletproof (it’s definitely much more strict than it used to be, and I think I heard fb tried compilation and I’m not sure if that’s become a thing, but it’s generally is more secure than interpretation for similar reasons)

All that being said, humans are just dumb and sloppy. We write shit code, and we try to minimize the surface area for mistakes. Rust has a much smaller surface area than php

So there’s plenty you’re leaving out there, like the fact he didn’t start spaceX or Tesla (although he sued the founders to not mention that publicly), and the Hyperloop is a great sci-fi idea that the math just doesn’t work out on (at least not in Earth’s atmosphere)

It totally supports what you’re saying, the only credit he deserves is as a hype man and for securing government assistance. Nothing he says or does convinces me he’s a smart or even slightly self-aware person, but…

Not a day after I posted, musk announced he wanted to remove blocking people on Twitter. That’s an idea a 7 year old could tell you is dumb.

Sure, the presence of the mute makes the platform worse rather than unusual, but still, holy hell Batman…

I agree with what you said, and the evidence supports you. But here’s where a very small part of me drifts to…

Let’s say he’s been trying a zero requiem since the beginning. He’s measurably advanced key technologies. He’s positioned himself to have the ear of very powerful people. He’s gained the respect of many of them for growing his wealth to become one of the richest people in existence. They listen to his methods if nothing else.

Now he tanks Twitter in a very public, blundering way. He expressed privately (in now public text exchanges) an interest in getting together a bunch of rich people to buy out social media, because it’s an possibly existential risk.

For those watching critically, it certainly looks like he plans to use Twitter to turn money into influence over the population. He keeps insisting moves that are killing Twitter have actually made them profitable. Other social media, like Reddit and discord, took notice and started flirting with these user-hostile ideas.

The most likely result is social media platforms splintering their user bases as they flee elsewhere, while the billionaire held up as an example of why billionaires are actually a good thing becomes hated by large portions of the population (particularly on the left, the side more critical of billionaires and capitalism)

Again, I think you’re probably right. I believe he’s just a spoiled asshole who read sci-fi and dreamed of being Tony Stark. I’m also deeply concerned about how he started getting political after meeting Trump.

But if he’s actually doing it all on purpose to become the symbol of a billionaire that needs to be reigned in, it would probably look a lot like what we’re seeing

My dad likes to send me videos. He sent me one yesterday… It seemed like he was at a harbor by the 8 pixels that got through

He also frequently emails me from his phone. I used to ask him to send videos to my email. Even tried to coach him through the process -surely they must have a share button?

I think iPhones are designed around the idea that “either it just works, or you shouldn’t be doing it at all”.

Even my technical friends seem to forget the fact they understand how all of this works the minute they look at their phone - I had to coach one through uploading a larger video to Google drive and sending me the link. My brother in Christ, we use GitHub together. We use Google meets regularly. We used Dropbox in college. Why are you acting like I told you to put it on a flash drive and mail it to me?

Well on the plus side, it pushed me over the edge to start making the first 3rd party client.

What do you think of the name flemmy?

Maybe I will! Maybe I spent the last few hours learning new tech and digging through source code to the websockets to play nice so I could make it totally platform agnostic! Maybe I named it flemmy and am on course to overtake jerboa in features with another few days of focus!

You always say you’re proud but never believe in me dad!

If you manage the mods, you’ve only created a second layer of mods.

Hierarchies have been an ideological plague on humanity since Rome - if you want to build a nice thing with clean lines it certainly helps.

If you want to build a community or an ecosystem, anarchy works better. Not no rules, but no rulers

Flatter organizations are more efficient and far more productive - if we shout down shills and move on when a specific group gets too echoey, we’ll be just fine

The strength of federation is (in part) the fact that names are only as special as the server they live on - I’m subbed to 4 gaming groups, so the moment one becomes toxic I’ll drop it.

And moving forward, we already have people experimenting with ways to reconcile similar groups across servers - I think the key is to maximize content delivery and individual control over curation while avoiding locuses of power that can be abused

Nah, that’s where the federation comes in. The tech has a lot of room to grow, but you never have to move to join the “winning” group for a topic - you just have to sub

Moving forward, there’s already talk about how/if you should reconcile overly similar groups across servers. It’s certainly possible, and discovery is definitely going to improve quickly - the only question is can Lemmy hold onto the new users long enough to get past the growing pains

Not Lemmy, but that exists. Libreddit is one of the “mirrors”, individual subs have been cloned in Lemmy too

You can spoof the user-agent, it’s a PITA but not that hard. I did it to use chat gpt with bing, but didn’t bother for Reddit

I recommend libreddit, no commenting and it’s slower, but at least it works on mobile

So, for a long time I’ve believed Elon is actually pretty dumb. He’s impulsive, was bad at programming, and frequently gets facts/figures absurdly wrong

But then there’s that chat log between him and other billionaires… It circled around the idea of private companies bring free to shape social media being an existential threat

He’s tanked Twitter and publicly boasts about how he turned it around and made it profitable through actions that drove people away from the platform. There’s no way the numbers work from what we knew before it went private, and they’ve stopped paying their bills - his claims are almost certainly false

And yet, social media companies are listening - frankly, they probably don’t care if it’s true. If rich shareholders believe it, then by copying his methods their stock price will jump. Reddit and discord have started new initiatives that piss off their users since then… None of the methods will immediately collapse a network, but they’re generally targeted towards driving away both power users and rockstar employees. It will starve the networks of content over time, leading to a tower of babble moment where the platform disperses-leaving smaller and fewer locuses of control on pubic discourse

So I keep coming back to this idea - is he a doing a zero-requiem and becoming the villain to inoculate us as a species against control by billionaires?

But then I think back to his ego, and think he’s probably just blundering a role he’s unqualified for.

But then, he does something else so dumb it seems like an intentional fumble, and it gets me thinking again

It’s seriously disturbing from a mental health perspective. They’re doing exactly the same things Facebook did that made it most damaging

The app always gives you something, it will add filler (in the form of front-page content) to your feed, changing the reward schedule and (very literally) training you to doom scroll longer with fewer posts you actually care about. It also gives the opportunity to shove something controversial in your face, which drives outrage based engagement

It also always gives you messages - if you didn’t get actual replies, it gives you sub suggestions or puts random posts in your notifications to try to get you back in the app

They also been doing A/B testing to try to maximize in-app time

It’s a literal recipe for addiction

Well, not only did this very nearly happen (a comparable size emission missed us by something like 12 hours), we have a pretty good idea what would happen.

Fires. Fires everywhere. Very little of our infrastructure is shielded, so basically everything would go offline… But that almost pales in comparison to the sheer number of fires started simultaneously

We do have hardened installations and a system to give a short warning to places in a position to unplug and protect certain equipment, but that doesn’t matter much in the short term because everything is on fire, and the air is filled with the toxic petrochemical gases we’ve been convinced to build everything out of.

Whoever survives the early days would theoretically be in a position to rebuild thanks to organizations like the US military - the knowledge of how is protected and there are plans to restore order. Most basic military hardware would be usable with maintenance (unlike most vehicles which rely on a bunch of microchips that don’t appreciate EMPs, and also fire)

Let me know if you figure it out, I had to do it through the browser

Everything on the internet is just bloat now, unfortunately

Weirdly, Microsoft is the one company that seems to be trending in the right direction (granted, with many, many missteps along the way). Or maybe they’ve just kept walking while most other tech companies race to the bottom