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DandomRude

@ DandomRude @lemmy.world

Posts
39
Comments
545
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Professor's got it right

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  • A friend of mine is a devout Muslim from a very conservative family and a doctor: he believes that his faith has no place in his job and therefore treats all his patients equally.

    I think fundamentalists of all religions should take a leaf out of his book.

  • Looks Who's Talking: Trek edition

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  • It must be nice when these parents unpack their old photo albums and show embarrassing childhood pictures to unsuspecting visitors: "Aww, look at the little guy, such a cute Borg baby" ...

  • TIL about Fedi-Search, an open sourced frontend to easily search the Fediverse with a lot of mainstream engines

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  • [DS9]Vulcan Love Slave? Why would that be someone's choice of porn?

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  • Maybe it's more of an intellectual thing.

    But either way, humanity alone has enough kinks to begin with, so when you add in the preferences of all those other species, things are bound to get a little weird.

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    AI is killing the web. Can anything save it?

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  • No objections.

    However, I think AI should also be regulated to compensate those who made all that possible in the first place - all those that contributed content to the underlying datasets or more like had their content put in those datasets without their consent.

    Otherwise, in my opinion, there will be less and less high-quality content on the internet because it will simply no longer be possible to earn money from it. Of course, there will always be people who create content without monetary intentions, but there are also many people whose profession it is (writers, journalists, artists, people in the entertainment industry, and so on).

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    AI is killing the web. Can anything save it?

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  • Indeed. From a macroeconomic perspective, it can certainly become a problem if people no longer have enough money to buy anything. This then quickly affects the advertising industry since companies need to cut costs.

    However you look at it, I don't think there's any angle from which it would seem sustainable to concentrate the majority of capital in the hands of just a few.

    Since AI is ensuring that the already precarious earning opportunities of content creators are now being transferred even further to a few corporations, this technology will only contribute to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

    I don't think that this can go on forever – not economically and certainly not socially.

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    AI is killing the web. Can anything save it?

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  • That was entirely predictable. First, social media companies earned billions from other people's content, and now AI companies are doing the same.

    But hey, it's all good as long as the bots generate ad clicks and the companies that place ads don't realize that the traffic is generated by bots — since they usually rely unquestioningly on the KPIs of Meta, Google, and the like, this will certainly take a while.

    /s, mostly.

  • Trump signs order creating new federal worker classification for at-will, political appointees

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  • Didn't he and his gang just approve an astronomical budget for his secret police? I guess the salaries for these puppets will be added to that.

    Hmmm, building a fascist dictatorship seems to be really expensive...

  • Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share In USA

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  • Here in Germany, at least something is happening. Recently, for example, the federal state of Schleswig-Holstein decided to switch to Linux (and also LibreOffice), with the change planned for this fall.

    Overall, however, far too little is happening in our country. The vast majority of federal states and the national government continue to rely on proprietary software (mainly from US corporations, especially Microsoft).

    At the national level, this is hardly surprising, as our Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is more of a US lobbyist than a politician: Until 2020, he was on the supervisory board of Black Rock Germany and was also a long time chairman of the "Atlantik-Brücke", a German-American lobby organization for economic relations (so on and so forth). Unfortunately, no change of course is to be expected from him — nor from his party, the conservative CDU, that is the most popular party for some strange reason.

    In Bavaria, which is also deeply conservative, the federal state government is even considering introducing Palantir.

    I don't understand how all this can happen when it is perfectly obvious how vulnerable all these US products are making us – vulnerable to industrial espionage and worse - especially now that the US is developing into a fascist, unjust state.

    But hey, I think we all have to remain somewhat positive despite all this. As I said, there is some movement in terms of FOSS —probably much more in other European countries than in Germany. So, slowly but steady, we're moving forward! I really hope that's how it is in the US as well.

    Best of luck in these harsh times!

  • Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share In USA

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  • Still far too low, considering that the US is now a police state.

  • Removed

    TIL the plastic wall plug, used in homes and construction worldwide, was invented by German engineer Artur Fischer in 1958. His simple nylon dowel forever changed how we hang, fix, and build.

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  • These things are called "Dübel," which is also a casual term for joint in German, and can also be used as a verb: "einen dübeln" means to smoke a joint — all things that help humanity progress.

  • Is social media an appropriate term to describe the logic of these applications? Or is it a term that obscures the logic of these applications?

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  • Yes, forum was and is a good term because it also conveys the roots of democracy in ancient times (a physical place where people met to discuss things of common interest). That was precisely the point a few decades ago: to distinguish between interactive communication media and mass media, which were characterized by one-way communication from a central sender to many recipients.

    Unfortunately, however, forum is now a term that sounds outdated because it is associated with the internet before Facebook (2004) – and I would classify Facebook today as a mass medium rather than a social medium, even though, unlike classical publishing media (newspapers and so on), it does not produce any content itself.

  • Is social media an appropriate term to describe the logic of these applications? Or is it a term that obscures the logic of these applications?

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  • I mean everything that falls under the term social media as of now, which includes Lemmy as well as reddit.

    And this is precisely the problem I see: The internet is a medium that implies mutual exchange - it is a social medium - this was already the case before the advent of so-called social media in the mid 2000s, a term that was coined to distinguish between classical mass media and "user generated content", meaning posts and comments by people who are not directly involved with the "Host" of the content.

    Now, however, we have the problem that the term, at least in the broad sense, describes services that, in my opinion, do not stand for free exchange between equals, but instead function more like traditional mass media, such as television stations or magazines and newspapers - they are centrally controlled and do not allow open discourse just as publishing media of old did.

    The Fediverse is structured differently -more like the old internet, but for applications that people would call social media today. I don't think the difference can be made clear by insisting that Fediverse apps are in fact much more in line with social media than what the term really describes for most people (meta, tiktok, LinkedIn and the like).

    So I think the term is burned and we need a new one that is understandable to the general public and clearly distinguishes the Fediverse from todays's so-called social media.

    The thing is, however, that it will be difficult to find a term that describes social media without using this very term, which is likely to cause confusion with services that today are actually more akin to traditional mass media, which did have letters to the editor but were not in the least "social" in a sense of exchange between equals.

  • Trump is waging war against the media – and winning

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  • This could be an opportunity for decentralized applications such as the Fediverse, which are not so easy to bring into line. But I fear that the apathy of the majority will make it impossible for people to recognize this alternative, even now. They will not take action on their own, even if it only means showing a little initiative and perhaps giving up some convenience. Instead, people will continue to be lulled into complacency and pretend that everything is fine, thereby forming the widely visible majority that serves as an excuse for their individual irresponsibility.

    This vicious circle is the most frustrating thing: All this is only possible because the majority allows it to happen.

  • The American system of democracy has crashed

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  • I find it remarkable that headlines like these are always phrased passively, as if it were a natural disaster sweeping across the country without anyone being responsible.

  • Military leaders aghast as Meta founder Zuckerberg crashes classified Oval Office meeting on fighter jets: report

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  • Because Musk made a lot of money being Trump's henchmen.

  • Considering all the technological advances humanity has made in the last 50 years, has humanity evolved in terms of civilization, stagnated, or regressed?

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  • That's a good approach.

    I myself don't see progress as a technical thing, but rather technology as something that could help us overcome our animalistic traits in order to enable us to live together in a good, forward-looking way. I mean, of all the mammals in the world, we are the best at building tools, but I wonder if we are making the most of this or if, despite all our tools, we are ultimately incapable of overcoming our instincts.

    I don't know the answer any more than anyone else. However, your answer, which I share, suggests that despite all our technological achievements, we are not evolving significantly, but remain trapped in our animal nature.

  • Considering all the technological advances humanity has made in the last 50 years, has humanity evolved in terms of civilization, stagnated, or regressed?

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  • Since technology would presumably make it possible for people to no longer have to fight over water sources, I ask.

  • Trump might ‘take a look’ at possible Elon Musk deportation

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  • That's true, of course — I completely agree with you. It's just that, with all the news from the US that I read every day, I've unfortunately become quite pessimistic.

    I'm keeping my fingers crossed that things will turn out alright after all.

  • Trump might ‘take a look’ at possible Elon Musk deportation

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  • I don't think this would poses much of a additional threat, as the US legal system already appears to operate largely arbitrarily.

    I think it's highly likely that Trump will pursue, deport, or detain other genuine political opponents who are US citizens on the basis of their heritage anyway. Therefore, I assume that this will be a thing regardless. The only difference with Musk would be that even the super-rich would no longer be safe - but hey, I'm sure that the courts will continue to make exceptions for people with deep pockets anyway.