Barry Zuckerkorn @ BarryZuckerkorn @beehaw.org

He's very good.

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2 yr. ago

I’d argue it almost definitely has to be better than engagement, though.

Totally agree. I think those who design the algorithms and measure engagement need to remember that there is a difference between immediate dopamine rush versus long term user satisfaction. User votes can sometimes be poor predictors of long term satisfaction, but I imagine engagement metrics are even less reliable.

In the 80's, Pepsi was gaining quickly on Coca Cola with the Pepsi challenge: having tasters blindly tasting Pepsi versus Coke and choosing which one they liked better. Pepsi won a majority of these. But over the decades, it turns out that consumer preference for a sip of each didn't necessarily translate over an entire can, or an entire case of cans. When asked to drink 12-20 ounces (350 to 600 ml) of the soft drink, regularly, people behaved differently than what they did for a 2 ounce (60 ml) taste.

Asking consumers to rate things in the moment still suffers from their less reliable momentary ratings of things they experience all day, day after day. Especially of things that tend to be associated with unhealthy addictions.

Yes, any insurance company with "mutual" in the name is basically operated for the benefit of the insured parties. The owners are the policyholders, and any profit the insurance company makes gets paid out to the policyholders as dividends essentially partially offsetting the cost of their ongoing premiums.

Turns out, though, plenty of insurance companies run this way can still enrich their executives at the expense of policyholders and owners, so you still need to keep an eye out for self-interested individuals (or incompetence that costs everyone money), even if the company itself isn't profit-driven.

Honestly, it'll probably have to go the same route that reddit's communities organically formed. As AskReddit got bigger, the IAMA and AskScience and AskHistorians and AskWomen and AskMen communities started popping up. As Fitness got bigger, the very specific niche fitness subreddits and sport-specific subreddits popped up, too.

For now, I'm guessing political and advice communities will start attracting some specific topics where a few people who have legal expertise will participate, up until there's enough critical mass to form a more narrowly focused community that specifically relates to legal topics and has a higher threshold for necessary background/knowledge/experience/education to be able to competently participate.

I’m kind of surprised more redditors haven’t jumped ship.

I had a bunch of alt accounts, for different purposes that I didn't want cross referenced (no need for my career-oriented alts to be associated with my political views or details about my family life or personal relationships), and then I just kept enforcing that principle of least privilege to segmenting my different hobbies and interests into different accounts. Third party apps made it easy, so I just kept doing that.

So now that I no longer use a third party app, it was a natural time to delete a bunch of old accounts. Lemmy provides enough of an alternate for any technology-related discussion, and I have confidence that the discussions about food, sports, entertainment, parenting, etc., will eventually reach near parity with reddit. For now, though, I keep my career-focused account to browse lawyer-related subreddits (including the private /r/lawyers), and my city-focused account to participate in discussions about my city, because I don't think lemmy will be there for quite some time. Of course, now that I no longer look at reddit from a mobile device, I basically only use RES+old.reddit whenever I happen to be on my personal laptop (which is relatively rare these days).

Exactly. There are legitimate concerns about whether law enforcement should be able to subpoena "third party" records (including video recordings) with a process less than a full blown warrant supported by probable cause, as determined by a neutral judge, or whether government should be able to compel the retention of records for a later after-the-fact search. That's a discussion worth having.

But voluntarily recording and retaining video means that the person who controls those records can choose to do what they want with it. Imagine if some homeowner had these cameras, and had their own home burglarized, and tried to turn over the video evidence of the crime, but the courts were like "whoa wait did you get a warrant for that?" It doesn't really change anything to have it be cloud hosted, or easily shared with a button, because that "share" functionality works for non-police recipients, too. Doorbell camera footage gets shared all the time on social media, sometimes because it's funny or interesting or otherwise worth viewing.

Weird. I'd say the correlation is much stronger that people who try to tear down others for fitness accomplishments tend to be more likely to be "deeply unhappy."

If anything, poor health is a more reliable indicator of unhappiness.

The API is much more limited for kernel mode, because Microsoft doesn't want to make it easy to crash the kernel. So it's not just a matter of taking old DOS code and making Windows run it in an old compatibility layer, but actually requires translating the whole thing into a much more limited set of commands to properly draw the graphics and respond to user input.

It's impressive like being able to play the French horn without using the valves, or painting beautiful pictures using only a mechanical typewriter. It's being able to do something that is trivially easy with normal tools, but with such a limited toolset that the accomplishment itself is impressive.

Who said it's fat, though? Sauropods are interesting in that they had systems of air sacs, like modern birds, that can puff up their apparent size without necessarily adding a lot of weight.

That's an error (or a typo). Those companies aren't "headquartered" there, but they are incorporated there.

The typical large American public company is incorporated in Delaware, with their stock listed on an exchange in New York, and headquartered wherever they actually do their business: San Francisco or Houston or Chicago or Atlanta whatever. Delaware and New York monopolize their respective segment of the business of the administrative paperwork of being a registered company. As another example, older companies that have physical stock certificates mostly have them locked up in a vault in NYC, with the ownership of the certificates just changing over in a ledger with every stock trade (millions per day) without the actual paper certificates being touched.