I like me some tech discussion and freedom.

Thank the sky above for the 1st and 2nd amendments.

Reality is best seen as absurd.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • No duh, because not a single country has made any real attempt to lower their citizens’ emissions.

    It will take sacrifice from all of us to stop warming.

    Forget 1.5°C, honestly, forget 2°C as well, keeping it under 3°C is likely the best that we can hope for right now. You’re needing to throw out our gas-based car infrastructure, reduce our reliance on jets as much as possible, lower not just meat consumption but also almonds/alfalfa/etc., and that is just to get started.

    Really, I don’t see the average voter letting that happen. What’s going to happen is eventually, sometime 30-40 years from now, a heat wave is gonna thrash the Middle East, consistent 130°F days for a solid month, 100,000 people dead, and the very next year planes will be in the air, making clouds to block the sun.

    We are not ready to give up the things that the developed world will have to give up to truly back away from this coming apocalypse.


  • This would be scary except for the part where I think many of these young activists would honestly rather have their whole search history read in court than vote for Trump.

    If it’s those two guys again, the election will go exactly the same way as last time, because 99.9% of Americans will have already decided before the first presidental debate even happens.

    I know I’ve already decided that I’m not gonna bother come 2024 if those two are back. But I’m more apathetic about politics than the average Tlaib listener. They will almost certainly fall in line the instant the primaries are clinched.


  • Open Source as a concept is kinda similar to fanfiction. They are both technically just statements of fact, either they are or aren’t, but both of them are very much intertwined with political “The big man can’t control me” kind of zealotry. Which, at least for the anti-corporation parts of it all, I can respect.

    But… OSS has a problem that fanfiction doesn’t have: maintenance. With a fanfiction, it either gets finished, standing on it’s own as a self-contained cake to be consumed and praised over, or the writer gets bored and the cake is unfinished. Either way, no person or business ever relies on that cake for their own goals, other than small personal satisfaction. It sucks when a writer leaves it hanging, but that’s just how the cookie crumbles, and the consumer moves on to another work.

    Open Source has to constantly update and expand to keep up with the technologies that it’s connected to. And guess what, most all of the major OSS success stories rely on paid workers to keep things up with the times, and make those crucial integrations that keep the software usable.

    Linux has many developers paid by their Big Tech employers to make stuff that they can use for their products without hassle somewhere down the line. Same with OpenStreetMap. Even worse with Android.

    Does anyone here really think there would be enough maintainment on these projects to keep it at the stability and feature-improvement they are now if all paid work vanished tomorrow? I certainly don’t. And unlike fanfiction, you can’t truly just say “well, we’re not updating it anymore”, at least, unless you don’t care about your whole use case and functional existence being replaced within a year, likely with a more-supported corporate alternative.

    There are two and only two ways to keep Open Source supported well enough:

    1. The governments of the world forcibly support them much the same way China invests in their companies, as a social good, replacing the corporate workers and funds with government ones.
    2. Luxury gay space communism somehow comes to fruition and these developers get all the free time in the world free from any other worry, ever, and the whole community forms so well that they all pick up each other’s slack with their newfound infinite free time.

    The first option violates the spirit of true open source much the same way as now, and the second one, actually, that’ll happen… the day after the perpetual motion machine is invented, that is.

    Reality hurts.


  • Honestly, I have no real clue.

    Twitch isn’t quite completely impervious to adblockers, with proxy extensions allowing us to skip ads still for now, but YouTube could do the exact same thing tomorrow if they wished. uBlock Origin wouldn’t save you, SponsorBlock wouldn’t save you, the only thing that could be done would be a black screen whenever an ad pops up.

    Maybe YouTube doesn’t want to fall into the hole Twitch is in, with the proxy loophole, and they view fighting adblockers as a better choice than having to spend a massive amount of encoding expense to have the silver bullet in every country.





  • It’s what needs to happen.

    People who can not abide by the social contract (whether by mental illness, addiction, or otherwise) can not be given the same freedom as people who can. They will likely abuse it for their own destructive aims. They need to be forced into rehabilitation, or, if they can’t be rehabilitated, a separate housing place.

    But…

    Those services they need are either overwhelmed or don’t really exist in many places, because none of us taxpayers want to spend the money to actually build them, or allow them next to our house. Which is fucked up. And it’s clear that nobody is going to willingly increase their taxes to do something about it. So, what then?

    I think it needs to be declared like wartime. Set aside a certain area, get as many help people as possible, and move these people over to basically a modified refugee camp, with what basically amounts to martial law to keep the peace as much as they can. Yes, it’ll be tents and sleeping bags, which is not good, but they need something. Don’t be like the NYC hospital law that sends them in for three days and lets them go back out to the street, because that helps nobody.




  • jray4559@lemmy.sdf.orgtoFediverse@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 year ago

    Honestly, the main problem for popularity’s sake is the un-diverse userbase.

    It’s a bunch of techy redditors, the same way that many other services that splinter off from reddit are. Almost all the communities are literal clones of reddit ones. So for someone who wants a similar style of place and doesn’t have a hatred of reddit corporate built-in, why would they not go to reddit, which has the same kind of userbase but with 100x the users?

    Honestly, other than “Open Source Master Race!!!111!!!111”, there isn’t any reason, especially not one that the average person will care about.

    Another one, and I fucking HATE saying this, not enough zoomers dragging their friends along. This place feels like a place for the 30-something instead of the 20-something. Which isn’t bad, of course, but in terms of network effect power it is, because peer pressure is huge for social media.


    But, separate from all that, do we actually want it to be that kind of popular? Maybe we should stay under the radar for the most part. Keep it from becoming stale and condescending like lots of Redditors can be. Keep the advertisers from sinking claws in. Maybe that’ll be better for the site as a whole than needing ads to support a service 100x the size.