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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • zabadoh@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlI had a journey
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    10 months ago

    I disagree somewhat.

    A lot of high tech development comes with a greed motive, e.g. IPO, or getting bought out by a large company seeking to enter the space, e.g. Google buying Android, or Facebook buying Instagram and Oculus.

    And conversely, a lot of open source software are copies of commercially successful products, albeit they only become widely adopted after the originals have entered the enshittified phase of their life.

    Is there a Lemmy without Reddit? Is there a Mastodon without Twitter? Is there LibreOffice without Microsoft Office and decades of commercial word processors and spreadsheets before that? Or OpenOffice becoming enshittified for that matter? Is there qBittorrent without uTorrent enshittified? Is there postgreSQL without IBM’s DB2?

    The exception that I can see is social media and networked services that require active network and server resources, like Facebook YouTube, or even Dropbox and Evernote.

    Okay, The WELL is still around and is arguably the granddaddy of all online services, and has avoided enshittification, but it isn’t really open source.


  • Was part of a team that was sent to Boston for a project. While we were there, the company announced they were changing the meal expense policy from reimbursement for submitted bills to a fixed stipend.

    But that policy change was a couple of days away, so the whole team went to this fancy expensive restaurant for dinner, and we ordered expensive food and wines as one last hurrah.

    I don’t even remember where or what I ate or drank.

    I just remember it was a good time.


  • Depends.

    Lemmy and reddit are definitely more media friendly.

    I think reddit managed to capture a certain generation of users for a lot of topics, and I think its recommendation algorithm helps keep the user experience more interesting by throwing exposing the user to new groups they may be interested in. Very similar to how YouTube works.

    But like other social media, the reddit algorithm also creates a very silo-ed, radicalized user base.

    Forum users tend to be older, and I have seen a few specialty forums die off due to attrition and a lack of new users.

    I think one huge benefit of forums is the good ones are tightly moderated, so bots and trolls are quickly dealt with.

    Forums whose topics where age is a lesser factor, or where non-commercialization benefits their userbase, are lasting longer, but generally they’re getting picked off.

    I think Discord is more like a media-friendly IRC, which was never my bag so I’ll let others opine on it.





  • I think you’re misunderstanding what the article is saying.

    You’re correct that it isn’t the job of a system to detect someone’s skin color, and judge those people by it.

    But the fact that AVs detect dark skinned people and short people at a lower effectiveness is a reflection of the lack of diversity in the tech staff designing and testing these systems as a whole.

    They staff are designing the AVs to safely navigate in a world of people like them, but when the staff are overwhelmingly male, light skinned, young and single, and urban, and in the United States, a lot of considerations don’t even cross their minds.

    Will the AVs recognize female pedestrians?

    Do the sensors sense light spectrum wide enough to detect dark skinned people?

    Will the AVs recognize someone with a walker or in a wheelchair, or some other mobility device?

    Toddlers are small and unpredictable.

    Bicyclists can fall over at any moment.

    Are all these AVs being tested in cities being exposed to all the animals they might encounter in rural areas like sheep, llamas, otters, alligators and other animals who might be in the road?

    How well will AVs tested in urban areas fare on twisty mountain roads that suddenly change from multi lane asphalt to narrow twisty dirt roads?

    Will they recognize tractors and other farm or industrial vehicles on the road?

    Will they recognize something you only encounter in a foreign country like an elephant or an orangutan or a rickshaw? Or what’s it going to do if it comes across that tomato festival in Spain?

    Engineering isn’t magical: It’s the result of centuries of experimentation and recorded knowledge of what works and doesn’t work.

    Releasing AVs on the entire world without testing them on every little thing they might encounter is just asking for trouble.

    What’s required for safe driving without human intelligence is more mind boggling the more you think about it.





  • It’s true that crypto is commonly used in online drug transactions, but there are other justifiable uses, such as moving money out of countries with repressive regimes like China and Russia.

    Also paying for certain genres of porn that major credit card banks like Visa and MasterCard have somewhat arbitrarily designated as unacceptable, such as certain types of BDSM e.g. consensual nonconsensual, anything that shows blood, kinky hypnosis and mind control, vampires, etc.

    Of course obvious child porn and bestiality should be banned period, so some regulation is needed. But I’m not sure that the government delegating responsibility for regulation to the credit card banks is the best way to do it. The rules and enforcement are completely arbitrary and cannot be appealed.