Kinda what I meant by plastics

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

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

Hey server buddy!

I think it’s a mindset - with a company at the head, if you don’t like the product, you should complain.

They need to understand this isn’t a product - it’s a project. It’s not mature yet, and it’s trying to solve a very difficult problem - how do you make social media healthier and more resistant to exploitation. The design they’ve settled on is complex and ambitious, and I’m pretty impressed it’s been able to scale up this well

All that being said, the main complaint I’ve noticed (and I think is valid and it often gets dismissed) - to sign up users are given a choice (which server to join), and to make an informed choice there’s a minimum of a few pages of required reading

It definitely matters, and the way you’re presented this choice is pretty overwhelming

I’m working on a Lemmy client, and my thought is this - break up the options. Give users a choice of 3-5 options with a “next” button and a search option.

Another is the difficulty of finding and subscribing to communities - I’ve noticed a huge improvement with some recent changes, but there’s always more that can be done

Anything else you’ve noticed? Particularly if it’s something to keep in mind as I write the app

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?

I generally dislike them, but do you really see them enough to bother? My dad texts them to me sometimes, but in general I rarely see them (outside of tongue in cheek usages, like mojo using 🔥 as a file extension)

What you’re describing is polarization within a community transforming it into an echo chamber, driving out much of the community. Sure, truechildfree formed out of people who still wanted a community based around that aspect of themselves, but they’re not the reason for the split - they’re a symptom. For every user that made the journey to truechildfree, there’s probably 3-10 that just unsubbed, and another 5 that just stopped participating

My personal example is AITA. It started off as a group judgement based on the morality of the situation, but in the last few years people have become obsessed with “rights”. I actually got tempbanned for a situation where a douche told a woman that by joining trivia night in a small town bar she was ruining guys night. I responded to someone saying “IDK why your bf wasn’t happy about how you handled it”, and I basically said “yeah, he’s the asshole, but clearly this is extremely important to him, and saying screw you I have every right to be here while he storms out didn’t just ruin his night, it soured the evening for his friends who tried to stop him. That’s not going to make you any friends in your new town, and a little compassion could’ve diffused the situation”. It’s hard to put into words (and that’s just the most salient example, I probably got more negative karma there than everywhere else put together), but the community moved from what’s the right thing to do into what’s your legal rights

As far as I know, there’s no trueAITA - the community just morphed into something I find toxic. The nuance was gone, and it became something very different to the sub I loved participating in. I almost unsubbed, but instead I mostly just would start writing a comment before deleting it and moving on.

I think fractured, smaller communities help with this more than anything. Humans generally adjust their morality based on their peers - and the bigger the community, the more the loudest voices begin to feel like they’re expressing the opinion of the majority.

If 10% of a large community upvotes a certain viewpoint, it takes all of the top slots. It’s a weakness of the popularity-based ranking system - a relatively small voting block easily dominates the discussion. The moderates just ignore it, because they disagree but not enough to actually fight it out

But force people together in a smaller, more diverse group, and they moderate each other. The trick is, you can’t do it through polarization - you can’t fragment a community based on beliefs or you get echo chambers.

You just have to throw people together and make them talk it out. Opinions naturally balance towards the mean when the groups are smaller, and the most cohesive voices dominate when the group becomes large

Sure, because YouTube was bought by Google - their investors already cashed out, so they no longer have the same pressure to grow at all costs

It’s because investors don’t care about profits - they care about the promise of profit growth.

You could make an investment, and normal valuation is like 3-5 years to break even. But if you’re rich already, breaking even does nothing for you - what you care about is what the value of your share of the company is worth in 5-10 years.

They’d rather risk it all and push for 100x ROI - anything from 0-5x is basically the same for them. Only exponential growth will matter for them financially, so at every turn they’ll push for you to take on more debt and reinvest everything in the hopes you become the Google (or get bought by them)

Because we have an absurd monetary system.

Companies also need to “grow or die”, the capital holders don’t want to invest in a sustainable company that turns reliable profits - they want line curve up

Reddit probably took on loans and additional investments to push towards growth plans, like the website redesign or marketing. They might’ve bought fancy office space to look the part, and bought big booths at conventions.

And maybe it all even worked - but the pressure is always going to be “take more loans and try to grow even faster” - not “pay off the principal so your monthly payments go down”. After all, if you double in size, paying off the loan would be trivial

Except the way our systems are set up, you have to keep growing until you can’t - at that point, you pop and deflate into a shell of what you were

That’s the one thing I’ll miss completely. I’m really into consent, and girls posting just to show off does something that porn alone doesn’t

Maybe Lemmy will get there, but I’ve seen nothing like that so far

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

I’ve been using it daily for 13 years and sporadically before that, and frankly Lemmy feels more like the platform I joined. Wave by wave, Reddit got watered down even as its essence spread to niche communities. I’ve spent years unsubscribing to big subreddits and finding smaller ones - on some level, it’s kind of nice to sub to everything that seems remotely interesting again

But I definitely get you. It just feels like the end of an era, I left other social networks because they were sucking up my time and giving nothing back, even up to now Reddit has been more good than bad (thanks to my carefully curated feed that the app likes to add to)

I spent a lot of the last week using it one last time, then this weekend started looking at solutions moving forward. On one hand, the replacement has been a step down… On the other, it’s improving where Reddit has long been in decline

It’s been an emotional week