jmp242 @ jmp242 @sopuli.xyz

Posts

20

Comments

537

Joined

2 yr. ago

I might just not be able to see outside my capitalist culture, but I think that's a long road to get the mass of society on board. There's just so many tasks that need to be done that I really doubt societal betterment would get people to do it.

There's a reason Peter Singer's stuff has only limited appeal.

We are still back at what's the alternative? Planned Economies are notorious for not being able to predict the right things to produce, and that tended to massively misallocate resources too, arguably worse, but at best in a different way.

Corruption also just seems to be a human thing and in planned economies people still snuggle up to politicians in corrupt ways, just with a different veneer.

We also have tried regulation on capitalism - capture happens. We tried liberalization of communism and we got modern China.

I think tribe based society might be the only ones I've heard of that focus on sustainably living, but that loses out to larger societies force / power, and I haven't seen a way to scale that up.

I guess I've just never seen any value in microblogs at all, which probably explains my confusion lol. I don't want a 160 character post from NPR about anything.

I agree with you about self hosting, I just don't actually see for something like NPR what federated services do for them. They're already the central source of what they want to publish. They have a website. Why complicate things? While I like an ad-free experience of Lemmy etc - I just don't get what NPR would get beyond having a comments section (discus?) on their news or opinion stories.

The best I can see is that it's essentially ads for NPR, but then it both seems to me like ... well ... buy ads, and kind of a sleazy thing to throw up stuff onto Mastodon in the hopes - what? People learn that NPR exists? Product placement into the fediverse?

I don't understand why they can't jusy write on their website or publish an email newsletter or RSS feed. Why do we need anything like Twitter for organizations?

OMG I can't wait. This was amazing.

I think the longest I've had to wait is for the light to change. Once the light flips red, the cars stop and I get a chance to walk (though it's too short imo).

I mean, not so much to me. You need to pay for something somehow, either via ads or money.

I believe so.

This "he isn't an idiot" or "not enough of an idiot" is the wrong way to think about things. Smart people believe all sorts of dumb things, and plenty of smart people can delude themselves, especially when they surround themselves with "yes men".

The other thing is X isn't the only social media platform, nor was ever a particularly large one as users go. Getting rid of Twitter just pushes people to threads, mastodon, bluesky and others. It doesn't actually shut down much speech at all.

I think the non-conspiracy thinking is just - Musk was addicted to twitter, liked saying edgy and engaging stuff and because of what was more of a boast but legally was a binding sort of offer to buy ended up forced to buy Twitter. The legal forces were well documented at the time. Now that Musk has Twitter, he decided to make it into what he always professed it should be, along with his egomania has made it more and more like any number of "free speech absolutest" spin offs that turned into right wing cesspools that regular people find less and less appealing, and advertisers really find concerning.

I can't see why you'd pay for a service that still had ads? It's why I've never gotten cable - if I'm paying, I don't want ads.

I don't know Rishi Sunak, but "a man is a man and a woman is a woman" seems like a tautology to me, so how it's "'sickening’ and ‘ridiculous’" escapes me, except as making yet another statement into a "dog whistle".

Of course he probably doesn't mean it this way, but taking the performative definitions and removing sex from the definition, then there is no actual thing to reference other than back to the word. There's no definition available - it becomes a qualia as far as I can tell. Actually, in some ways less than that - it becomes a bit of a "no true scotsman" argument, or a "what is canon in franchise" sort of thing. Because the performance of a man or woman is basically whatever each individual person says it is. It can convey nothing that isn't a stereotype and is likely harmful.

Anyway, the terms become meaningless - and in general anything we cared about there was to me actually based in the sex, not the gender anyway.

Yea, that's kind of painful.

I'm a big fan of cyberpower. If you want full remote management, buy one with the web control card, I'm pretty sure you can do anything via that. You should be able to get one in your pricerange.

• Personally I hate the everything is flat with no borders. Like - what was wrong with buttons looking like buttons (3D and an animation WHEN YOU CLICKED THEM)? Now it's like - what's the button?
• The "hamburger menu" - why can't we have the traditional set of menus across the top? No, now it's an extra click for no reason.
• Why do we keep adding clicks to get to stuff? Why is right click -> more -> open in file manager -> rightclick -> properties so I can figure out where a shortcut GOES in Win10?
• Hiding scroll bars, and not having the little buttons on the sides. Now I can't easily click on down or up to slightly scroll when I need to look for something, no on very log docs I'm just wildly swooping around.
• Ever more clicks to do anything.

I actually think the root problem here is the minimalist design ideas. The problem is minimalism isn't some design handed down by God or something, and it works horribly when what you're trying to interact with ... is basically a Swiss Army Knife x 2 trillion. I find minimalism nice for a vase, or a single purpose tool or device. But for computers it either makes them ever harder to actually use (now we've got docks we have to carry around with our laptops so we can plug in a USB device or flash drive or monitor vs just having the ports on the laptop because... well having a bag of wires, dongles, and a dock is so minimalist right?), or basically hides / removes functions.

Remember all the things you could do in Windows 98 that you can't do in Win10? Like one control panel to go to. You could set window, menu etc fonts and colors. etc. I mean simple UI things - no, we've been slowly trying to go back to a very limited OS interface.

Granted, I don't use Windows for most stuff anymore, so it doesn't bother me as much, but some of this stuff just follows you. Gnome does this crap so I can't use that anymore and have to look for forks from the programs that have a usable UI.

I mean, the claim is it's going to revolutionize the cell phone like the iPhone did. I'm not saying how "worth it" it'll be. I'm saying I don't see it changing the form factor much, or the general way you might interact with your phone much. Maybe I'm reading too much into the iPhone part - the change from ever smaller flip phones or slide phones to kind of ever larger slab touchscreens.

It was obvious when you pulled out an iPhone in 2008 you had the new hotness. AI is mostly invisible - how do you make that a status symbol? People already voice interact with their phones, or type interact with their phones. Unless this AI is mind reading and mind writing, I'm not seeing how it's going to be that interface sea change or visual style change. All the things I can see current AI helping with are entirely incremental in terms of using an interface.

https://windowsreport.com/desktop-vs-laptop-market-share/ implies that desktops market share is shrinking, but it's not as low as I thought it was. That said, many desktops I see out there in business (and at work) are "tiny" ones that you can't upgrade either, they're a laptop without the screen built in.

When I talk about a benefit to upgrading most parts, I mean that if you go buy say a general consumer model at Wal-Mart, you probably can't just change out the CPU because the sockets change frequently. The RAM may have a spare slot, or be able to be increased in size, which is probably the most bang for your buck unless your PC happens to be a slow spinning disk. Most of the pre-built PCs have a PSU sized exactly for what's in the box, and there usually isn't a discrete GPU. Not only that, but there aren't extra plugs, so you're not plugging in a PCIe GPU without swapping out the PSU.

All things I'd imagine most computer buyers don't or can't do. They buy a box, and when it "dies" they buy a new box. I've only met PC Gamers online in the last ... 15 years or so. Everyone else uses a console, phone, or gave up gaming.

No one I know upgrades PCs in a 3 year cycle and haven't since the aughts. This is because high end PCs from 2010 worked straight through 2022 for people - Windows 11 is pushing new PCs, in so far as people care to upgrade / patch. Most people want the cheapest PC possible, which means they're not upgrading anything till it breaks. And they upgrade the entire PC at a time.

As to the phone I have, I have a Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite from 2019. No desire to upgrade it till it dies.

I'm not sure that you're not underestimating the cost for these sorts of services. The only long running sort of social media (BBS) I know of that is and has been for decades straight pay for access is The WELL. And they need to charge $15 a month.

https://www.well.com/join/pricing/

Of course, they're not anywhere near the scale of Facebook, but they are similar to a mid sized fediverse server from what I can tell. I honestly think the actual thing going on is most people find value in a free service, but don't find enough value to pay what it'd cost to make it a straightforward pay for service business.

I think this is showing both how much your data is worth, and what it costs to actually run / use these services. People don't want to pay, but I've always thought pay for a service was a potentially much less shitty business model. However, instead what we often get now is both pay for a service and still privacy invasion / selling our data. And who's going to trust Facebook here?

I just still can't see how AI as it currently exists will help there. I think glasses based heads up displays will be more useful if they ever figure them out, and eventually something like the Minority Report waving your hands in the air interface making the phone mostly just the "tower" would be far more likely to revolutionize phones than a better Siri or search engine. Even to the extent of it thinking... I have had human virtual assistants for like a decade and shooting them email didn't change anything about my phone.

I don't think that is big - no one buys tower PCs anymore where you already can do that sort of thing, because there actually isn't a benefit to upgrading most parts anymore. I am still using my android phone from 2019 because it literally does everything I could want a phone to do. I may be lacking vision, but I also don't really see what AI is going to do here to change the form factor. The reason the slab has endured IMO is that it is a swiss army knife of the pocket computing device. You don't want to go back toa phone with a tiny screen and just talk at AI because that's a terrible web browser ui. It's a terrible book or comic reading ui. It's a terrible gaming ui. It's bad for displaying chat, pictures, videos etc.

AI will probably help voice to text and vice versa so we can talk text instead of making a phone call better. I can see it helping anytime you don't want to go into your phone, but I also see it as a new interface roughly like Siri. And no one thought that Siri was the iPhone of anything.

I just don't think AI first makes sense. Everyone wants the Star Trek computer until they actually try and use it by talking at a computer. It's just not efficient imo.