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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 14th, 2023

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    1. “Handset” is obfuscating legalese to refer to a cell phone in a way intending to distance the meaning of the word from the thing that the old and technologically illiterate people who rule on this use every day.

    2. I’m no fan of their strategy, but cell phone providers have claimed for a long time that filling your phone with unremovable bloatware causes the overall price to decrease. Their argument is most likely that they will have to charge more once the propagators of that bloatware realize that they can no longer force it on people and wedge that as a reason to pay less to carriers.

    3. The reality is that cell phones are priced based on what people will buy anyway and carriers pocket as much of the money as they can that third parties pay them for their bloatware. Ultimately because of that this ruling hurts their bottom line, but the above reasoning gives plausible deniability in the face of the law as it is interpreted by old technologically illiterate lawmakers



  • Being self righteous about doing nothing is worse.

    Despite your own brand of defeatism in insisting the outcome is the same no matter what, one side actually is better. Even if the metric of “better” pales on the grand scheme of what we deserve or should be doing.

    I’m not trying to project self-righteousness by recognizing that there are only two real choices. I’m asserting that advocating non-action or pointless action is such a tired trope that what you’re doing is circlejerking for dopamine instead of applying what little influence you have as an individual to work toward the avoiding the actual worst outcome.


  • When the American populace as a whole is brainwashed into believing the only choices are red and blue, you have to accept that whining about it and voting green (or not voting) is going to accomplish nothing.

    So make your colorful allegory and feel good about yourself on the internet. In the end, you are accomplishing less than the people you look down on who recognize the shitty reality of our situation.







  • This is incredibly disingenuous. The US might not be a true democracy, but it’s not an authoritarian regime. Xi and putin disappear people who have an opinion on whether they should be forever-rulers.

    The fact that independent parties exist and hold seats at all three levels of government mean you are fundamentally wrong in saying there are only two choices.

    The US is a flawed democracy. That’s still better than an authoritarian regime.



  • The paradox of tolerance applied to this situation suggests that in order to keep a community where choice is preserved, we need to be intolerant of bad actors with the ultimate goal of killing that choice.

    Meta absolutely is a bad actor looking to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish the fediverse.

    They’re pivoting the overwhelming userbase of Facebook/Instagram into a sort of federated Twitter alternative that their users as a whole don’t understand but do generate content for, in an attempt to steer the federation architecture into something they can control and make money off of. It’s not subtle.

    Whether it will work or is even possible for meta to do remains to be seen.

    But, yes. To answer your question, we need to “deny the choice” of federating with what amounts to a wolf in sheep’s clothing to preserve what we have, because that wolf is looking to destroy it.

    This post demonstrates that all of the major instances on lemmy but one understand this concept. If lemmy.world doesn’t want to acknowledge what meta is doing, then they’re also a bad actor in enabling meta to do it.


  • For people who consider this a sign of social status

    Ok well,

    1. Anyone who considers apple products a status symbol already has bought in and won’t be swayed one way or the other by windows becoming worse.

    2. Anyone who actually understands technology knows that regardless of how many different apps or environments apple OS’s provide, you are always operating in a closed system with the tools they allow. Whereas an operating system like android, or Linux, or (at least for now) windows, your options for the capability of a tool are limited only by what exists or what you have the capability to write.

    In short, apple isn’t an OS that technologically literate people flock to as an exclusive option.


  • In addition to the other great points in this thread, Apple has a cost barrier that other operating systems don’t.

    In an economic climate where everything is getting more expensive, a consumer isn’t going to fork out $800+ on a MacBook or an iPhone without first actively wanting to be part of the ecosystem, especially if the hardware they have gets the job done.

    The reason Apple isn’t growing as fast as it’s competitors right now is exactly that. Apple is expensive to get into. No amount of enshitification on other OS’s is going to change that.


  • I start almost every comment I make on those instances with

    I know this will net me a ban

    to play a bit of reverse psychology with the mods there, who don’t touch my comments when the denizens there inevitablely say

    Oh yeah you think you’re so smart well we don’t ban opposing opinions unlike some places

    And the mods there have their hands tied because banning me would prove their own guys wrong.

    It’s worked pretty well so far.



  • Unpopular opinion incoming:

    I don’t think we should ignore AI diagnosis just because they are wrong sometimes. The whole point of AI diagnosis is to catch things physicians don’t. No AI diagnosis comes without a physician double checking anyway.

    For that reason, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing that an AI got it wrong. Suspicion was still there and physicians double checked. To me, that means this tool is working as intended.

    If the patient was insistent enough that something was wrong, they would have had them double check or would have gotten a second opinion anyway.

    Flaming the AI for not being correct is missing the point of using it in the first place.


  • While I agree with you that the teacher in this post is wrong about what this is, I don’t think labeling “gender bigotry” indiscriminately as something both sexes do under one umbrella is accomplishing anything but minimizing the struggle women have endured for basically all of human existence up until the last few decades.

    Personally, I wouldn’t fault this woman for thinking what she does if she’s willing to accept a broader explanation later, given that women have literally been sold as property up until a couple hundred years ago.

    Women have the right to at least posit the ways they as a group have been held down, and that includes accepting their indignation and allowing them grace for when they’re wrong, because without those things they won’t actually learn the truth.

    Further than that, I think it’s necessary for women learning now to have the same realization this one did that women throughout all of history save for this recent tiny sliver have been oppressed. Even if it’s built on an incidentally faulty premise, that doesn’t mean the realization itself is wrong.

    Covering up the discourse by labeling the process of realization as “gender bigotry” is itself an attempt at erasure, and very much puts you on the side of the oppressors, just because you think it’s distasteful to have this realization yourself.

    I’m sure gender bigotry exists in the direction of women towards men. This ain’t it.


  • Guarantee that the line of reasoning here is

    We can stop the inevitable fact that people aren’t going to buy our shares by pushing them on the most chronically addicted users of our platform and disguising it as a premium exclusive offer

    I mean, who else is susceptible enough to the sunken cost fallacy that they would pour actual money into reddit? The answer is the demographic that’s already put in a substantial amount of investment in the form of time spent on content creation.

    To those people, they might very well bite because it means their useless, time consuming hobby finally might become a source of income.

    It’s honestly an intelligent business move by reddit, even if it’s scummy as fuck and ultimately setting up their own best content creators to spectacularly fail and lose a ton of money when the shares tank.

    Reddit still goes public. Reddit still pays their CEOs obscenely before they jump ship. Only the creators lose.