deweydecibel @ deweydecibel @lemmy.world

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1,207

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2 yr. ago

I don't want to dismiss the facts. There are terrible things going on but overall we're living our best lives at the same time.

You are dismissing the facts, then.

You could only truly believe this if you're a financially stable, healthy, gainfully employed, cis white man. Because for everyone else in the States at least, life is getting harder. You can cite all the statistics you like about the globe, but that's not relevant to what people experience in their own lives.

And more importantly, the things that people are depressed about are the things that are getting worse, and on track to keep getting worse. A video about statistics in 2007 isn't accounting for what we know in 2024 is coming in the future. The outlook is far more grim now.

People have been saying this about social media and the news for a long long time, and every single time they fail to take the context into account. People said this in 2016, too. "Your anxiety is just the media riling you up". Then the anxiety ended up being a very accurate thing to feel, and in the years after, the real world events caused negative effects on people's lives.

The world is not a TV show. What happens in the news, what people talk about on social media, no matter how negative it skews, those things happen in real life, not a vacuum. Many of them affect you in ways you can't even comprehend, and many of them affect you in very obvious ways that some people just seem to want to overlook.

That doesn't invalidate the negative news, though. I mean, what good news do you think they're not reporting that makes up for the actual shit going on in the world that has a real, tangible effect on people's lives?

"Your future is completely fucked, from finances, to freedoms, to democracy, to the damn climate itself.

But, hey, the bees are coming back. For now, at least."

Every time I see people try to blame the media on this, I look at my medical bills, I look at my bank account, I look at the temperature, I look at the cost of housing, I look at the vacant seats where my coworkers sat before they were let go, I look at the election results, I look at my sister who had her right to an abortion stolen, I look at the hateful people that vandalized my trans partner's car...

And I think, damn..the media sure has some real reach, don't they? They're really going all out to make me miserable. I mean, this is some impressive commitment to a narrative. One day I'm gonna break free and live in this reality where "Everything is fine, actually" with the rest of you but first I gotta figure out how the media has me in the Truman Show situation.

I've discovered over the years that curiosity is maybe the most important aspect of being good with technology.

Technical skills, patience, problem solving, organization, all that is critical, obviously.

But more often than not, it all starts with just wanting to know what's possible. I'm the kind of person that, after installing something for the first time, be It software or a game or whatever, the very first thing I do is open the settings, and look all the knobs and levers that are available.

I was genuinely stunned to find out that the vast majority of users never look at the settings ever. And maybe that's why developers seem to be increasingly unwilling to even provide options for those of us that like tweaking settings.

I keep hearing this but it's perplexing.

Students have been using laptops in school and college for a long time now, no matter how much time they spend on their phone.

What I encountered in IT isn't people who have no idea how to use a computer, it's people that have very little idea how to use Windows over Apple or occasionally Chromebook. But even then, they usually still know Windows from needing to use it at some point in school. It's the settings and other little things they struggle with, not the basics.

I have to explain things like how to right click because a lot of people have grown up only using phone/tablets

Or they come from iMac or MacBooks where right clicking is less emphasized as it is on Windows.

Think back to when we were kids. Remember that period of time when not everyone owned a computer? Or if they owned one, it wasn't necessarily used much? There were people that were "computer people", who used computers daily for entertainment or tinkering or socializing (once the consumer internet took off) and there were people that didn't need or care about them outside of their workstation at the office.

Even after the Internet, this dynamic was there. You had the enthusiasts who really spent time on their computers and got to using them well, and you had people that simply owned them and checked email or browsed the Internet from time to time.

The enthusiast/non-enthusiast dynamic has always existed. There's always a gap. It just takes different shapes.

Now, everyone owns a smartphone and uses for everything. They're critical to life, enthusiast or no. That's the baseline now. The gap is entirely in skill and usage, not so much hardware or time spent on it.

Before computers and the internet, no tech skill was needed to interact with our modern world.

After them, and for a few decades, the skill floor rose. You needed to learn technology to participate in the modern world.

Now technology has reached a point where the skill floor has dropped down to where it was before.

The mistake we made was in thinking that our generation learning to use technology was happening because they wanted to. It was incidental. Skill with technology comes from desire to obtain it, not simply using technology a lot.

Need some more details here.

A "guys" laptop? Like a student or a faculty member?

Did you report it to the police or to the IT department or other faculty? Who were you in this school? Teacher?

What do you mean by the cops "investigating" you? Like asking a few questions to get it on record? Or getting into your computer? Were they accusing you of something? Who called them in the first place?

The problem is the software isn't making it simpler to operate just by abstraction, much of it is by subtraction.

It's not turning two buttons with individual functions into one, it's removing a button all together, even for the people that knew how to use it.

The problem with the abstraction is, the more you rely on technology to replace certain skills, the more dependant on it you get, and the tech industry is getting less dependable and increasingly predatory when it comes to the users that are now dependent on them. That dependence also leads to more market entrenchment.

For example, if you don't know how to manage files, you are trapped forever with iCloud or OneDrive until they create easy ways to transfer everything seamlessly between clouds (and they won't). That's bad for users and for the industry overall.

Basically, without the skills, you have to trust the tech companies to guide you by one hand and not stab you with the other, and they are increasingly unworthy of that trust.

They're also market-locked. If you have so little ability to function outside of an app, you become incredibly resistant to moving from one to another unless it's identical, and you're incapable of using marginally more complex things.

It also gives immense market control to the app stores, have been allowed to exist mostly unregulated. Thankfully that might be changing.

When everyone must be spoon-fed, that makes the only company selling the spoons insanely wealthy and powerful.

It's also going to have a degrading effect on popular software overtime. When the only financially viable thing is to make apps for the masses, you are not incentivized to make something extraordinary.

Compare Apple Music to iTunes, just on a software level. Just on the sheet number of things you can do with iTunes, all the nobs and levers, all the abilities it grants a user willing to use it to its max potential. At some point, it no longer became viable to create an excellent piece of software, because most people have no skills or patience or desire to use it.

So you start making things that don't empower the user, instead you make things that treat them like children, and your products get stupid.

Driving behavior analysis, or telematics, as the insurance industry calls it, could be better for consumers, leading to personalized rates that are more fair. Plus, if people have to pay more for their risky driving, they may drive more cautiously, leading to safer roads. But this will happen only if drivers are aware that their behavior is being monitored.

I'm so sick of this shit.

Just like the stop sign cameras, this only increases safety by penalizing and then monetizing minor mistakes that humans make. This is not about safety, it's about maximizing income through technological micromanaging of drivers who have not caused an accident and were not in danger of causing one.

You'd also have to be a damn fool not to realize that all the data they're collecting may not apply to their rate structure today, but in the future that rate structure will change, and suddenly a history of driver data you let them gather about you goes from being unremarkable to indicative of a problem.

The shareholders are demanding a blood sacrifice, so rates suddenly go up for people that have a driver score beneath a certain threshold where previously that threshold was higher.

Or some new bullshit study comes out claiming people that listen to podcasts while driving are infinitesimally more likely to cause an accident than people that listen to music, and whoops, Michael Barbaro has been your constant companion on every morning commute for the last 4 years. That's a pattern of risky behavior.

To offer the counterpoint:

Local and private communities, if they remain only for meta content, is fine. But if they are used for other content, because they don't want other instances seeing or interacting with it, it can permit an instance to isolate itself and its content from the rest of the fediverse, while still being able to enjoy all the shared content from other instances. I.e. show me yours, but I won't show you mine.

Then, if these local only communities are the only places where people on that instance are sharing certain content, it's breaking the whole idea that it shouldn't matter what instance you're on. If instances can remain insular, it starts making more instances attractive based on their size. "If you want to enjoy this content, come join our instance."

Also safer spaces for groups targeted by bigots

Then they need to ban the bigots. Why should only the people on that instance have access to the safe space? Why is someone from another instance instantly judged as making the safe space less safe? It's basically saying "come join our instance", which is, again, going to cause unintended consequences.

Why are people so intent on this meme?

Bruce Wayne is literally the kind of .1%er that can only live in fiction: an actual good one, that uses his wealth ethically in all the ways no one with that degree of wealth would ever do in the real world.

Not unlike how Batman is the ideal fantasy vigilante taking the law into their own hands (i.e. uncorruptible, unbiased, and uncompromising in his ethics), Bruce Wayne is the ideal fantasy billionaire that isn't a drain on humanity.

Neither are realistic, neither exist in real life, and that's the whole damn point. It's aspirational and escapist.

It's the reason why Lex Luthor is a villain and Bruce Wayne isn't.

Literally Season 4 of Harley Quinn.

This is why federation should have a standard that needs to be followed. Been saying that for a year now.

Instance level administration/moderation has an effect on the democratic system that is the backbone of the entire federation. We can choose not to federate all their actions, but it still has an effect on instance A when something isn't visible on instance B and instance B visitors can not not vote on it. It skews the outcomes for everyone.

So there should be a standard for federated instances to administer and moderate fairly and honestly, in line with established and public rules.

Agreed, but let's also be honest about this:

The smaller, less visible alternative communities seldom grow. It's the classic case of the biggest and oldest trees getting all the sunlight, while the saplings in their shadow are stunted.

We saw this on Reddit, too. Alternative subreddits, usually born out of protest of the moderation on the original, popped up all the time and never grew. Some did, some even overshadowed the original, but that was rare. The algorithm and search results would always funnel visitors to the old one.

Unless there's an effort made to give more visibility to the smaller and less established alternative, there's a good chance it goes nowhere.

So in reality the user choice you're describing is less about choosing between two communities, and more about choosing between a community or a DND group that gets together once a week, but half the people flake out anyway.

Who is "they"? The entire instance? Every single user in every single community on that instance You don't think people around here spread lies too?

Hexbear and lemmygrad were instance-wide operations. They existed for the purpose of disruption. Lemmy.ml is not that and has never been. It holds a large body of individuals who share the same beliefs, but that's not the whole instance.

And are we establishing a dedicated, impartial, fact checking body to evaluate everything? If not, then defederating the entire instance based on "lies", determined by people with their own biases, is about as slippery a slope as you can possibly get.

Besides, you keep talking about "lies" but what I see in the evidence you linked is mostly about admin actions. So let's not punish the users of either instance for their admin, let's open some dialogue about it.

But the greater issue here is that the whole concept of this federated platform is basically moot the more fractured the federation becomes. If admins can't put aside biases and commit to the idea of federation, then it isn't going to work, and this would create the most evidence of that. I agree the admin actions over there are eyebrow raising, but the biggest instance defederating from one of the other biggest and oldest instances is cutting off our arm, their arm, while making this whole thing less useful and even more confusing for new users.

I don't know if there's a good answer, here. Rogue admins in charge of massive instances is not something that can be dealt with easily. But defederating is going to cause more issues than it solves.

Maybe the central problem is racing to put other people out of work period, regardless of who they are. Maybe putting people out of work is not a net benefit for society, it's actually negative in the long run, and only truly a benefit for shareholders. They don't need any more of those at the expense of the working class.

Like how there was a damn good reason for the start menu button to be on the button right: you could fling your mouse the lower left and no matter if you did it too far or fast, it would always hit the corner, and be at the start button. You never had to "target" the start button, you simply went all the way down to the left. Didn't even have to look.

So obviously, they must of had an equally smart, thoughtful reason to put it in the middle, right? That's a decision born from utility, not aesthetics. Clearly not making a painfully obvious attempt at copying their main competitor.

Honestly? Any of them except the last one. My preference would be 2005-2015, but any of them is better than what came after. Late 2010s was alright, but around 2020 you can really tell UI designers got their marching orders.

It's all so damn boring and lifeless. Rounded corners on literally everything for no reason other than trend chasing, wasted space and needless gaps between elements, white OR black - rarely anything else, lest it interfere with whatever systemwide adaptive coloring thing is running (even if there isn't one), boring and lifeless icons/logos, an obsession with "clean" and "streamlined" that effectively equates to the removal of usability for aesthetics, etc. All of it copy and pasted to every single piece of software or app or site.

Its ironic you put Corporate Memphis images next to it in the 2015-2024 section, because that is effectively what this trend in design aesthetic will be remembered as.

Bland, lifeless, safe, focus-grouped garbage, implemented by companies that have reached a point where the innovation is dead, corporate consolidation has effectively destroyed any room for something new and original to enter the space, and the only thing they do anymore is trend chase. Even the slightest bit of originality or doing something different from the market leader may risk the potential loss of a sliver of shareholder profit, and that simply must never be done.

And I swear to God, if I hear one more focus group generated argument about how rounded corners are more inviting or human, I am going to break into your home, and personally change every last single doorway into a hobbit hole, and every window into a port hole.

I think they're talking about the designs, not the whole decade.