Barry Zuckerkorn @ BarryZuckerkorn @beehaw.org

He's very good.

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2 yr. ago

Vim is a text editor that works in a command line and therefore doesn't require a graphical interface or windowing system, or anything like a mouse or trackpad or touch interface. It has a whole system of using the keyboard to do a bunch of things really efficiently, but the user has to actively go and learn those keyboard shortcuts, and almost an entire language of how to move the cursor around and edit stuff. It's great once you learn it, so it creates a certain type of evangelist who tries to spread the word.

This meme template is perfect, because the vim user really did learn a bunch of stuff, and then wants to try to convince other people to do the same, using a pretty unpersuasive rationale (not using a mouse while programming).

The streamers are very protective of viewership numbers and even the show's producers can't get access to that information. So all the payment formulas are based on subscribers, not viewers. A show that nobody is watching is too expensive to carry.

Most of these shows pay residuals to actors, writers, directors, and production companies based on formulas of how many subscribers the service has. Notably, none of the services are willing to publish detailed viewership statistics, even privately to creators, so the shows have to pay the same amount regardless of whether 1 person is watching or 1 million people are watching every day.

Rather than throw good money after bad, the services would rather take the show off entirely and not have to pay any residuals going forward. Then, with the show/movie making no money going forward, they get to write down the fair value of that intellectual property, which also saves the parent company on taxes.

Young people tend to be more persuadable before 30, and tend to bake in their political views around that age. So big events in one's 20's tend to lead to lasting partisan affiliations for life after that.

FDR's presidency won over a lot of people to the Democrats in the 30's and 40's. Eisenhower's presidency shifted people over to Republicans in the 50's. Nixon pushed people away from Republicans. But by the 70's Democrats were losing a lot of voters, and then Reagan won a bunch of people over to the GOP. Then 9/11 won people over to Republicans, while the Iraq war pushed them away.

But each of these things had an outsized effect on those under 30. So Boomers who remember getting fed up with Democrats in the 70s and crossing over for Reagan (and then voting Republican in every election since) just thought it was the effect of age, rather than the effect of that particular political moment in 1980.

And even though this data and the analysis is mainly for Americans, it's probably reflective of how people shape their own political beliefs everywhere.

Each subreddit had its own atmosphere and culture and environment. I would expect the same to happen here, only with an opportunity for different instances to also foster their own dynamics, in addition to each community within each instance.

We’re too small to have niche thriving communities

The same was largely true of reddit when I joined (in about 2008 or 2009). There were a lot of technology/science/engineering/programming people in the mix, so there was good content for that, but most of what it was just kinda grew out of some ideas that had come from other forums (lolcats style content, advice animals memes) and from internal inside trends organically bubbling up within the community (the concepts of the AMA, TIL, ELI5, AITA, narwhal fandom, grumpy cat, reddit switcheroo), and then weird turns of phrases the people started repeating elsewhere like a cargo cult (the overuse of the word "obligatory," accidentally a whole word, ಠ_ಠ, playing with movie titles by adding or removing or switching letters). We saw the rise and fall of some content creators and power users, the rise and fall of communities (/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu, inglip, space dicks, all sorts of communities that eventually got banned).

Trends don't stop trending. Any community, large or small, ends up developing its own cultural touchstones and a shared history. Eventually we'll see things turn from innovative to an inside joke to overdone within different lemmy communities, too.

But I do miss having the “fucking [insert slur here]” “kill yourself” “only a basement-dwelling loser would have this opinion” comments auto-hid because the average passing user disapproved of it and decided to express their disapproval via downvote, instead of coming across it myself semi-frequently and reporting it.

This is why I think downvotes are an important element of the UI and ranking algorithms. No matter how many members there are, or how many comments or votes there are, there are still going to be 24 hours in a day and 168 hours in a week. So naturally, smaller communities actually tend to have larger gaps in mod coverage in length of time between an item going onto the mod queue and being resolved by a human mod.

So I'm in favor of mechanisms being built in for removing content from easy view, without mods. Downvotes seems like the easiest way to implement that kind of mechanism.

The US has basically all 4 major healthcare insurance systems in a single country.

The Beveridge model, used in the UK for its National Health Service, is essentially socialized medicine where the government literally owns the hospitals/clinics and employs the doctors and other professionals who work within that system. It exists in the U.S., too, in the Veterans Health Administration system, and the military's own hospitals, plus a few smaller systems like the Indian Health Service.

The Bismarck model, common in much of continental Europe, is essentially an "all payer" system where private insurance can still exist, but where all the insurers are paying the providers the same prices for services. Providers are private, but the highly regulated price structure means that private providers can't just demand their own prices (lest they get cut out of the insurance system entirely). Insurers can be private, too, but all plans must offer specific features, in a way that ends up pushing the pricing and coverage to be fairly uniform throughout the system. This exists in the U.S. in the employer-provided health insurance system, or the "Obamacare" ACA exchanges, where most states regulate what insurance coverage there can be, what prices they can charge, and then all the providers and insurers negotiate prices that end up looking pretty similar. Realistically, someone who gets Aetna through their employer doesn't have all that different of an experience from Blue Cross Blue Shield or Cigna or United.

The Medicare model, or single payer model, basically puts everyone on one public insurance plan and has that insurance system negotiate prices with providers as a monopsony. Doctors and other providers don't have much room to just opt out of the system, because in a society where everyone has insurance for no or low out of pocket expenses, doctors won't be able to charge significant out of pocket expenses for normal services. It's what Canada has, and what the United States has for everyone over the age of 65, as well as everyone under the age of 18, and most people below the poverty line.

The chaotic market-driven model, where patients and providers essentially shop around and negotiate one-off pricing for services, is basically what remains for anyone not covered by the three models above. It might be how markets work for most other stuff in the western world, but among developed nations only the U.S. uses it in a significant way for health care markets.

Single payer, or Medicare for All, is at least something that one can envision for the United States, but I think it's far more likely we end up with something like the German/Swiss model, which probably would be the easiest transition among the 3 major universal health care models. One disadvantage is that it doesn't really look like what we see in other English-speaking countries (Canada's single payer, UK's socialized medicine), so there aren't as many people explicitly calling on the U.S. to adopt models already implemented in other countries.

The idea with high deductible plans is that the ordinary policyholder just pays out of pocket for everything in a normal year, but they're covered against catastrophic loss in years when they get in a $50,000 car accident or need $750,000 worth of chemo and cancer treatments. The insurance might not provide much for the 30 or 40 years of your life in which you spend less than $1,000 per year on a few doctor's visits, but it'll pay for itself that one year when you're paying $5,000 instead of $1,000,000.

I really can’t understand why an instance with the .world domain is so US-centric.

Honestly, I think it has a lot to do with a lot of the other popular lemmy instances being specifically oriented around a specific non-US country, so that those of us who are in the US felt deterred from joining the ones that explicitly included ".de" or ".ca" or ".ch" in their domain, with German/Canadian/Swiss stuff in the sidebar.

Restricted membership groups are still valuable, no matter what you want to call it.

Shared experiences are often a good foundation for a group: residents of a particular neighborhood, alumni of a particular school, members of a particular family, etc. You can see lively discussion there that opens up in a way that might not happen in a general open group.

Common beliefs also form a good foundation for group membership. Almost every religion has meetings of other members of that religion, where discussion can happen within that framework of that religion's views. A Baptist bible study group wouldn't tolerate a new member coming in and just insisting every meeting that the Bible is fake and that Christianity is a lie. Does it create an "echo chamber" of only people who believe in a specific religion? Well, yes, because that's the point, and why those members choose to congregate there.

Hell, I'm in a sibling chat thread where specific members of my family feel safe talking about their struggles with their significant others, roommates, jobs, neighbors, etc., because we like being able to bounce ideas off of people raised like us, by the same parents, in the same household. I don't think we'd be able to have that productive conversation if we didn't have that specific thread that we knew was just for us, and not for the other people in our lives to read and comment on.

Unless you're taking the radical view that people shouldn't be allowed to congregate in smaller groups that restrict membership, safe spaces are a natural consequence of how people associate with one another.

It doesn't even need to be for marginalized communities, either (even if the benefit is most pronounced for those who don't feel comfortable being themselves in the broader public sphere). Large organizations have always seen the benefit of smaller subgroups for like-minded people of similar experience/background to have a narrower discussion, even if some of those subgroups have quite a bit of social power out in the broader world.

For example, I am active in a few online communities (and in-person social circles) consisting of lawyers. As a profession and as a group, we have plenty of power and influence, so the benefit of having a gated space, even if we feel "safe" elsewhere, is still to foster discussion and community.

Churches and religious student groups will run Bible studies and the like, and they don't tolerate people coming in and trying to derail the conversation by questioning the premises of their religions, either. Even if (or perhaps especially if) it is the dominant religion in their area.

but because of the fossil fuels generated by the companies they invest their money in.

Lemme go ahead and roll my eyes here. Yes, American Airlines produces a significant percentage of the world's greenhouse emissions. But they burn that fuel for the passengers, not just for the benefit of shareholders. Same with ExxonMobil, BP, etc.

Consumption is what drives pollution. Investments to profit off of that consumption is secondary.

Your second paragraph about sound mimickry, as far as I’m aware, is not accurate.

It is. The recording copyright is separate from the musical composition copyright. Here's the statute governing the rights to use a recording:

The exclusive rights of the owner of copyright in a sound recording under clauses (1) and (2) of section 106 do not extend to the making or duplication of another sound recording that consists entirely of an independent fixation of other sounds, even though such sounds imitate or simulate those in the copyrighted sound recording.

So if I want to go record a version of "I Will Always Love You" that mimics and is inspired by Whitney Houston's performance, I actually only owe compensation to the owner of the musical composition copyright, Dolly Parton. Even if I manage to make it sound just like Whitney Houston, her estate doesn't hold any rights to anything other than the actual sounds actually captured in that recording.

It's not meaningless.

I know that it's pretty easy to pick the lock on my front door. Or to break the window and get in. But still, there are a non-zero number of burglars who would be stopped by that lock. Same with my bike lock, which is a bit harder to pick but still possible. Nevertheless, the lock itself does deter and prevent some non-zero number of opportunistic thefts.

There are a non-zero number of law enforcement agencies that would be stopped by full disk encryption, even if the device is powered on and the encrypted media is mounted. There are a non-zero number of law enforcement agencies that would be stopped by all sorts of security and encryption strategies. And I'd argue that simple best practices would stop quite a few more than you're seeming to assume: encrypt any data at rest on any devices you control, and then use e2e encryption for any data stored elsewhere.

You don't even have to be that technically sophisticated. For Apple devices, turn on FileVault (as it is by default if you log into an Apple account when you set up the device), turn off iCloud. For Windows devices, use Bitlocker. For Android, turn on the "Encrypt Phone" setting, which is on by default. If you're messing around with your own Linux devices, using LUKS isn't significantly more difficult than the rest of system administration.

A human brain is just the summation of all the content it’s ever witnessed, though, both paid and unpaid.

But copyright is entirely artificial. The deal is that the law says you have to pay when you copy a bunch of copyrighted text and reprint it into new pages of a newly bound book. The law also says you don't have to pay when you are giving commentary on a copyrighted work, or parodying a copyrighted work, or drawing inspiration from a copyrighted work to create something new but still influenced by that copyrighted work. The question for these lawsuits is whether using copyrighted works to train these models and generate new text (or art or music) is infringement of those artificial, human-made, legal rights.

As an example, sound recording copyrights only protect the literal copying of a sound recording. Someone who mimics that copyrighted recording, no matter how perfectly, doesn't actually infringe on the recording copyright (even if they might infringe on the composition copyright, a separate and distinct copyright). But a literal duplication process of some kind would be infringement.

We can have a debate whether the law draws the line in the correct places, or whether the copyright regime could be improved, and other normative discussion what what the rules should be in the modern world, especially about whether the rules in one area (e.g., the human brain) are consistent with the rules in another area (e.g., a generative AI model). But it's a separate discussion from what the rules currently are. Under current law, the human brain is currently allowed to perform some types of copying and processing and remixing that some computer programs are not.

Dietary cholesterol isn't well correlated with serum cholesterol, which is what the paper you've linked is about. It even veers off into the natural conclusion if you believe that serum cholesterol is the only thing that matters: statin prescriptions for everyone!

I mean, you just defined YouTube.

Well, I was trying to give a broad enough description to cover literally every video service, so mission accomplished!

My point is that every service will have different items in each category, and that splitting up the world's catalog of content into many different services ends up breaking down the economic benefit of bundling. The YouTube bundle is different from the Netflix bundle, which is different from the Apple TV+ bundle, which is different from Disney+ and Hulu, which is different from Max (formerly HBO Max). YouTube has live content, but if you want to watch a specific basketball game live, you'll have to subscribe to the service with that (and you'll have to endure ads and product placement as part of that game). And maybe that's not the $15/month YouTube Premium, but is instead the $73/month YouTube TV.

Going back to cable isn’t the answer. It’s a failed model and needs to die.

Defined narrowly enough, yes, that old model is dead.

But more broadly, as an economic matter there will always be a business model for having a basket of content, with some portion of historical content (classic movies and tv shows from decades past) on demand, some ongoing/current on-demand content (last week's episode of some scripted show), and live broadcast (sporting events happening right now). Build up enough of a catalog, charge a single price to subscribers for access to that content, and people will pay for the entire bundle. And because each subscriber is interested in a different portion of that bundle, the mass of subscribers essentially cross-subsidizes the fat tail of niche content: I don't mind paying for your niche if it means my niche gets to survive.

The technological and cultural changes have deemphasized the importance of cable's live delivery mechanism of 100+ "channels" each with programming on a specific schedule, but the core business model still will be there: subscribe to content and you can get some combination of live channels and a catalog of on-demand content.

The content owners, through either carriage fees with the cable/IPTV providers, or through the streaming services, or everything in between, are trying to jack up the price to see what the market will bear for those bundles. They might miscalculate to the point where the subscriber count drops so much that their overall revenue decreases even with a higher revenue per subscriber (and I actually think this is about to happen). And then instead of a market equilibrium where almost everyone pays a little bit to where there's a huge bundle of content available, the little niche interests just can't get a subscriber base and aren't made available, even if the content is already made.

You're 100% right.

The 12" MacBook had a great form factor right at the time that Intel CPUs really started to struggle with performance at lower power consumption, so the design turned into a huge weakness for thermal management. If they had similar performance per watt as the base M1 later showed off, that device would've been perfect for an ultraportable laptop, the spiritual successor to the discontinued 11" MacBook Air.

Sorry, in Linux everything is a file, so there is no "everything else."