• 6 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • Isn’t Reddit currently messing up things with search? And yeah I’d agree with the stable users comment. We shall see what the next few months look like to tell.

    I think that the adoption will mostly work in steps. Lemmy is currently functional, not pretty, not stable, not well moderated, not well integrated with federation, and poor discovery but it is functional.

    Hopefully the next time a wave hits, Lemmy will be more mature and ready to take in more users who will already have communities set up even if they’re small.

    I’m concerned though given the slower pace of updates that’s often complained about though.


  • Tbh it’s the reason I asked. I expected results to look about like this but I’m really interested in the graphs of posts vs active users.

    Posting has exploded. I assume a good portion of that is bots. Bots posting news or reposting memes probably. However, a good portion of that must be users posting as well right?

    I don’t think that retaining about half of the users that joined in the massive wave is bad actually, it’s the trends that come next where we see what happens. If that line keeps going down for the rest of the year, the platform is probably in trouble.



  • I actually think these apps are perfectly fine, I just think that you should have to request the location from the phone and then that request also alerts the kid.

    I’ll paint a different picture for parents in this thread. Gen Z does not have adequate social spaces in which to exist. So when you say “hey I’m going to track you” it’s like oh cool, track me going where exactly? To basketball practice and back? Or to the mall so you can know which store I’m in?

    Parents are gaining more and more control over their kids and I don’t think it’s good. They aren’t independent people. As a kid I hated having zero autonomy, it sucked. So all this is achieving is making kids feel like it’s less hassle to just stay at home and play video games.


  • Walmart, the biggest grocery retailer in the entire United States, uses face tracking in the majority of their stores in several sections, and we’re concerned about their Wi-Fi?

    The Wi-Fi seems like such a minor problem compared to them collecting massive amounts of data off of something you aren’t consenting to explicitly.

    Like you walk into their stores and they can know: How often you visit, what items you buy, what payment method you use most often, what items you looked at and what aisles you visit, who you bring with you, what your kids look like, what disabilities you may have, size of your household, and whatever else they want. There’s basically no respect for any privacy in their stores.

    The US is a privacy nightmare in competition with China. Most of the US doesn’t have any option over their privacy. You just don’t get it here.



  • Playing some old nostalgia classics currently. I previously made my way through the entire Sly Cooper series earlier this year so I decided I’d try to emulate Crash Bandicoot on the deck.

    I’ve had about as many bugs as I would with normal emulation and resuming from wake can sometimes make things go a bit strange. Other than that I’ve had a great time 100% completing 1,2, and 3. Working on Wrath of Cortex but I’ll likely finish it tomorrow. That game turned out to be quite the challenge.

    Can’t tell you how nice it was to play those games on a plane though. Would’ve made my younger self so happy to be enjoying a game like that though.


  • Yeah I find most of this to be similar to what I’ve heard so that’s good confirmation, thank you.

    The reason I’m considering it now is that: 1. I believe it will be applicable to industry and will raise my initial pay and work out in the long run. 2. I don’t want to work through a masters. 3. It will only take me 1 year to do it. And 4. I have a way to pay for it so I expect it to accrue very minimal debt. I have about $25k debt from my bachelors but I expect not much more to come from my masters from scholarships/assistant for a professor.

    So I’m viewing this as more of a deal, I wouldn’t consider a masters if any one of these things weren’t the case probably.


  • Wow this is good feedback. I’ll just give some short thoughts on what you said, but thank you for all of that. I’ll also use your comment to give more info about what I’m doing.

    1. My program is on the civil side of engineering and is most applicable in space exploration and crossover with other engineering fields. I expect industry would find most of the skills I’d use valuable.
    2. I’ve heard this and I’m prepared, but luckily I’m not doing a thesis if I go for this. I’d be writing papers instead.
    3. One of my goals is to establish good contacts, so this is good to hear
    4. I’m trying to avoid this actually, I’d rather not work and do school at the same time
    5. Very much heard and I’m not considering a PhD unless I find myself either enjoying research or I have a career application for it.
    6. I do actually have a research assistantship lined up so paying for a masters shouldn’t be a problem.



  • Agreed, totally depends on how much you watch. But shopping used DVDs and like I said banding together with friends to buy content eventually begins to work out better for you.

    I’m not someone who consumes tv and movie content en masse so it works out for me to do this and for a lot of people who watch a season or two of a show a month, it’s not that much more expensive to own.

    What I meant about the capitalism concept is that the core idea isn’t about enjoyment or getting to watch what you want. It’s not about convenience anymore. This is a capitalistic cycle where it stops innovating and starts to poison it’s consumer.

    So shows will now be splintered across services, shows will get cancelled for being less profitable, and the overall quality will dip because we’re driving art to the bottom price. Whatever makes shareholders more money. And is this true? I feel like it is. Quality of shows has dipped quite a bit to fit the streaming service pricing.

    We can argue about whether people want that or not, but it’s basically just what’s been done with every other consumer item. Dominate the market, lose money, get the subscribers, and then make their experience shittier over time.


  • Oh let’s be real here, this is what capitalism does. It chooses the worst possible option for entertainment because it’s what makes the most money. What makes the most money is not making you happy, but getting you to stay subscribed.

    Let me tell you the real secret. You know what it costs to rent a movie online? And stream it? And then never watch it again? Yeah now justify that against streaming services.

    I’ll tell you right now, go get Plex. If you don’t already use a media server, start. Because chances are that you don’t actually watch 90% of what’s on those services. So that $15 a month for content you don’t own could easily be $20 a month on content that you do actually own. Not to mention there’s no ads involved and you can stream as many devices as you want from anywhere. Get friends to pitch in and it’s even better.

    The ONLY argument for this is convenience of all the shows at your fingertips. Except now that’s not the case and they’re on different services, screw it, either pirate the media or buy it used on disc.






  • I want to be clear still, piracy isn’t a problem or wrong necessarily. I’m not pushing a corporate narrative by saying this, I’m more concerned about creators and other sites that use ads for revenue such as newspapers. So if you want to “pay” a site without money, don’t pirate their content. That’s all. That’s similar to what Linus has said.

    But I think this is somewhat similar to asking you for a ticket at the door for a movie. If the “ticket” is watching the ad and they’re asking you to buy the ticket (with premium) or get it from ads, bypassing the doorman would mean it’s piracy. Doesn’t even matter if the doorman doesn’t try to stop you. Doesn’t matter if they don’t pull you out of the movie.

    You being the product is irrelevant to the piracy thing. But it is relevant to the moral thing


  • Purchasing and pirating don’t have contractural agreements. You don’t have to have a ToS to pirate something.

    If DuckDuckGo does block the ad in their browser, they’ve done the work for you. And if they do not but instead Google decides to serve it to you without ads in a browser, it’s not piracy to not have ads.

    As long as the intended revenue of the content you’re viewing is being blocked, you’re pretty much pirating it. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong, it’s just a definitional thing.



  • I see what you mean but I don’t agree. The deal being made here is obvious and you’re signing up to give them data in exchange for watching a video. You’re also signing up to view their ads. You have an option not to be the product at all. You already have the wheat, but you’re giving the middleman less than what was arranged, not just producing less.

    And if you view it as okay to not give them what they’re asking for while getting the content anyways, that’s chill. Just recognize that you’re paying less for the content than they’re asking. This is even more enforced by YouTube and news papers who charge for ad free experiences.



  • Believe it or not, I think he has a point and isn’t at all a hypocrite. He’d show you how to pirate and torrent stuff (and has before) while also telling you he doesn’t recommend stealing. What he was saying is that the content isn’t meant to be free. The ads pay for the content. So not watching ads means the producer doesn’t get paid. Its a soft form of piracy but he wasn’t telling you what to do about that. He just said “Be aware you’re not giving people anything for their content”. I don’t know why thats controversial, he’s not even suggesting its illegal or even immoral. I never understood the arguments here but I also dont visit twitter



  • CleoTheWizard@beehaw.orgtoMemes@lemmy.mlLouis Rossman is right
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    1 year ago

    I think repairability is a discussion. But we can also talk about how android makers cut updates off sooner which dooms the hardware to be trashed quicker. Or the very real human cost of google killing projects related to android and selling data. Also, a lot of the Apple stuff has to do with cost to repair, not repairability. At the end of the day, Apple can and does repair and resell their stuff. They just charge more to do so. But a lot of their users pay up for it. Would be interesting to see the stats on where broken devices end up for each