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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • It’s not. Why do you want it to be? It’s one of the most enduring social media monopolies, and it should be brought down. The more they lose revenue, the more they are forced to squeeze, the more they enshittify, the more people are pushed to make and use alternatives, and the stronger those alternatives get.

    Honestly once youtube’s network can be usurped by something like peertube, I think that might be the ballgame for centralised social media. It is the hardest one to topple because of bandwidth costs, which means once it goes the case for needing a corporation to fund our networks kind of collapses with it.


  • The enshittification is carried over from other products. They’re meta, so anything they launch is partly along the path already, because they can artificially boost the launch numbers with cross-platform promotion, and because everyone already knows what assholes they are, they’re starting off with a lot of goodwill lost.

    Basically, just slapping a new name and a new account creation process on some new features in their social network, is not enough to make it a new network.





  • Honestly youtube barely has it currently. The vast majority of creators make very little on the platform and rely largely on supporter donations, merch and sponsorships, which could work on any platform.

    By squeezing creators out of every penny they can, youtube has forced people to find other options abd made themselves less and less relevant. I guess that’s enshittification for you.

    You can also gate access to certain videos on peertube, so a nebula-like model might also work eventually.








  • These people just want to talk about gadgets and none of the political implications, even though those implications are unavoidable. They are the classic centrist “apolitical” people who don’t realise they have politics, but they’re just default status quo acceptance and ignorance of oppression.

    This is just an old man yelling at clouds. If the mods of this sub wanted to change the topics, they could, but it would probably tank the sub. The people complaining could start their own sub with their own rules, but I’ll bet it’s not nearly as popular. Plus it takes work, and people who think it’s a good use of their time to passive-aggressively whine about a sub they don’t maintain aren’t going to do that much work. They’re not cut out for it.


  • Excrubulent@slrpnk.nettoTechnology@lemmy.worldThe erasure of Luigi Mangione
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    1 month ago

    What if I told you that television shows were dangerous? It’s true. In the year 2000, four out of every five injuries occurred in a home that owned a VHS copy of Robocop III. Someone might say, “That’s compelling Robocorrelation, but that data alone does not suggest Robocausation.” Fine. But maybe your first instinct was to say, “Robocop III is a movie, not a TV show, you fucking dumbass.” If so, then congratulations, idiot, you’re a Technical Genius. You’re smart enough to spot a technicality, but too dumb to know everyone else did too and it was light years away from the point. You’re the kind of person who tells your doctor, “Um, it’s Chief Chirpa?” when he tells you that getting the Wicket doll out of your asshole will require surgery. “And, um,” you’ll add, “it’s an action figure? Maybe you should have gone to a non-stupid medical school.”

    The nice thing about being a Technical Genius is that it feels like proof you’re smarter than everyone. They can say you don’t “get it” all day, but they’re the imbeciles who think Robocop III is a TV show. Look at it like this: You are the only one in the history of Koala Times Bus Tours to contract syphilis from a koala bite. You might be embarrassed, but at least you aren’t like those other fools screaming “Don’t touch the koala bears!” when they are in fact marsupials. I mean, if koalas were actual bears, your whole face would be missing, not still here and covered in pulsing chancres.

    Technical Geniuses reach maximum annoying when they decide that pointing out technicalities is a sense of humor. For instance, if you announced, “My wife is pregnant and we’re having a boy,” a Technical Genius might quip, “Well, technically only women can have babies. Unless you count the Chief Chirpa action figure currently breaching my anus – um, which you should, since it is the dictionary definition. Heard of it? Hey, everyone! This idiot with no dictionary is watching me shit out a Chief Chirpa, and he doesn’t even know which gender gives birth!”



  • I maintain that it would be relatively simple to create an open source version of an app/protocol like this that serves people’s needs for this exact use case, and if it were designed for any community to use, it could be essentially free as you say and high quality, and be a single point of service for everyone.

    If this were done right it could put all these thin platforms out of business and allow delivery drivers to establish fair terms for themselves.

    This would be a really good fit for federation I think.



  • I’m glad you appreciate it, it was as much an excuse for me to unload that rant as anything else :)

    But we actually get into trouble when our models of reality are poor. Our nature isn’t self destructive at all, look at how many times we’ve been at the brink of nuclear annihilation and someone said, “actually don’t”, some of them in defiance of entrenched power structures that punished them for it.

    We’ve had that world ending button for most of the last century, and we’ve never used it. If we really, on an instinctual level, were self-destructive we never would’ve evolved.

    I think the real problem is the power structures that dominate us, and how we allow them to. They are aberrant, like tumours. They have an endless growth strategy, which just like in malignant tumours tend to kill the host. If they’re destroyed, the host can go on to live a complete life.

    And things can change fast, these structures are tenacious but fragile. Look at the UHC assassination - claims immediately started getting approved. After decades of entrenched screwing over of people, they flipped on their back the moment they were threatened. How many other seemingly intractable problems could be cut out tomorrow if we applied the right kind of pressure?


  • I wouldn’t put too much stock in notions of a great filter. The “Fermi paradox” is not a paradox, it’s speculation. It misses the mark on how unbelievably unlikely life is in the first place. It relies on us being impressed by big numbers and completely forgetting about probabilities as we humans tend to do what with our gambler’s fallacies and so on.

    Even the Drake equation forgets about galactic habitable zones, or the suitability of the stars themselves to support life. Did you know that our star is unusually quiet compared to what we observe? We already know that’s a very rare quality of our situation that would allow the stable environment that life would need. Then there’s chemical composition, atmosphere, magnetosphere, do we have a big Jupiter out there sweeping up most of the cataclysmic meteors that would otherwise wipe us out?

    All these probabilities stack up, and the idea that a life-supporting planet is more common than one in 400 billion stars is ludicrously optimistic, given how fast probabilities can stack up. You’re about as likely to win the Lotto, and it seems to me the conditions for life would be a little more complex than that, not to mention the probability that it actually does evolve.

    I think it might be possible that life only happens once in a billion galaxies, or even less frequently. There might not be another living organism within our local galactic cluster’s event horizon. Then you have to ask about how frequent intelligent life, to the point of achieving interstellar travel, is.

    You know why your favourite science youtuber brushed right past the rare earth hypothesis and started talking about the dark forest? Because one of those makes for fun science-adjacent speculation, and the other one doesn’t.

    It also relies on the notion that resources are scarce, completely brushing over the fact that going interstellar to accumulate resources is absolutely balls to the wall bonkers. Do you know how much material there is in our asteroid belt? Even colonising the Moon or Mars is an obscenely difficult task, and Fermi thinks going to another star system, removed from any hope of support by light years, is something we would do because we needed more stuff? It’s absurd to think we’d ever even consider the idea.

    But even then, Fermi said that once a civilisation achieves interstellar travel it would colonise a galaxy in about “a million years”. Once again relying on us being impressed by big numbers and forgetting the practicalities of the situation. Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across, so this motherfucker is telling us with a straight face that we’re going to colonise the galaxy, something we already know is unfathomably hard, at approximately ten percent of the speed of light? That is an average rate of expansion in all directions. Bitch, what?

    If we did it at 0.0001c, that’s an average speed of 30km/s, including the establishment of new colonies that could themselves send out new colonies, because it’s no good to just zoom through the galaxy waving at the stars as they go past. That seems amazingly generous of a speed, assuming we can even find one planet in range we could colonise. Then we could colonise the galaxy in about a billion years.

    Given the universe is 14 billion years old and the complex chemistry needed for life took many billions of years to appear, and life on our rock took many billions of years to evolve, then the idea that we haven’t met any of our neighbours - assuming they even exist - doesn’t seem like a paradox at all. It doesn’t seem like a thing that needs explanation unless you’re drumming up sensational content for clicks. I mean, no judgement, people gotta eat, but that’s a better explanation for why we care so much about this non-problem.

    No, the Fermi paradox is pop-science. It’s about as scientific as multiversal FTL time travel. Intelligence is domain-specific, and Fermi was good at numbers, he wasn’t an exobiologist.