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Telorand

@ Telorand @reddthat.com

Posts
11
Comments
1086
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • NY Orders Apps To Lie About Social Media Addiction, Will Lose In Court

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  • Good anecdote but this is just hegemonic propaganda. Social media has also revealed the reality behind the hegemonic narrative. That's what they're actually afraid of.

    It's not propaganda, it's a fact. The rise of conspiracy theories becoming mainstream, the rise of fascist groups that are currently undermining global peace and stability, the ability for long-debunked pseudoscience to be treated as equal with science: all of that is facilitated by social media giving an equal platform to people that do not deserve one, particularly the platforms run by capitalists. Social media has indeed done some good, but my argument was never that social media is wholly bad, just that it's a net negative.

    I agree that "they" are afraid of The People organizing and seeing through all the bullshit, but that's not something unique that social media is able to facilitate, and it's not something social media has been particularly effective at doing. People of the past were able to see through the bullshit without social media, and if we all lost the internet tomorrow, people would still manage to communicate and share ideas. We did it for decades through books, newspapers, speaking events, zines, etc.

    We don't need social media to progress, and I would argue that recent history seems to indicate the contrary.

    It's not true. What about the people in charge of this platform? The bulk of the issues arise from capitalism and this type of censorship is designed to abolish its criticism.

    There are no people "in charge" of this platform. If you wanted to, you could spin up your own instance with the sole member being you. You could fork the code and start your own Lemmy v2.0. We are collectively responsible for the operation of this federation of services, and even here, you still find the tolerance of bad actors and the spread of rotten ideas.

    Has the Fediverse been a net positive? Maybe. But we are small fish compared to the fat cats that are Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Xitter, etc., and there's no dispute that their influence has reached far and the ideas they've allowed to fester for profit have been destructive, to say the least.

    Social media doesn't exist in a vacuum; it's within the context of a global society run by greed, and the fact that it sometimes does good doesn't outweigh the capitalists who weaponize it against us.

  • NY Orders Apps To Lie About Social Media Addiction, Will Lose In Court

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  • I mean, it has enabled every goober and bad actor with an opinion to essentially have a megaphone and build platforms and movements. I'd argue that's a net negative. Even the Fediverse isn't immune to propaganda and conspiracy theories.

    I think putting a warning on the tin is appropriate, especially for platforms run by billionaires whose explicit goal is to get people hooked and keep them feeding the machine by any means necessary.

    It's true that the bulk of the issue arises from the people in charge of the platforms, but nobody currently in power is going to do anything about the billionaire problem. This is at least a vague gesture acknowledging that a problem exists. Also, it's just a sign. When have warning signs stopped people from doing things that are unhealthy?

  • NVIDIA To Bring Back The GeForce RTX 3060 In Q1 2026 To Tackle Current-Gen GPU & Memory Shortages

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  • Batman: Return of Joker is also an amazing feat of NES technomancy. Not a supremely great game, mind you, but what they were able to achieve graphically on the NES rivals some SNES games.

    Especially with big AAA companies, I think devs have gotten lazy with their optimization passes, because bigger cards means they can just continue cramming more into a game without bothering to budget for optimization.

  • Two Linux Distributions I'm Watching Closely in 2026

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  • Wait, they are? I thought I was going crazy and missed a big shift in the latter's project goals! Thanks for pointing that out

  • I'm brave enough to say it: Linux is good now, and if you want to feel like you actually own your PC, make 2026 the year of Linux on (your) desktop

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  • I've done this with an old Pixel (partly to wipe the phone, and partly as a hope that if it's refurbished/resold, the new owner will have Graphene). If you can read and follow a recipe, it's virtually stupid-proof. I don't remember having to know anything for which the directions didn't specify or offer explicit directions.

  • New Linux Patches Allow More Easily Changing The Tux Kernel Boot Logo

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  • I run both CachyOS and Bazzite. They have graphical stuff for the initial load screens, but I've seen their text-based loading screens from time to time for troubleshooting purposes, and I don't recall seeing Tux either.

    I'm curious who sees Tux when they boot up.

  • Google Deploying Huge CO2 Battery Facilities with Company Energy Dome

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  • Exactly. It would have been better for them to put their money towards not generating CO2 in the first place. Batteries are nothing special, and they're signing off on this project so they can appear green, because it uses CO2.

  • Winux Tries to Mimic Windows While Staying Fully Linux

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  • That's a good point. You'd have to know your intended user. Somebody who only uses flatpak probably doesn't need to worry about anything, but if they want to start layering, they'd run into problems on a major version change.

  • Nearly all of Spotify has been scraped and is available via torrents

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  • I find that unlikely when considering the current trajectory of AI.

  • Winux Tries to Mimic Windows While Staying Fully Linux

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  • Honestly, if someone wants the ease of Windows but isn't tech savvy enough to figure out "typical" Linux, I'd just point them to Aurora. Fedora atomic, easy system upgrades, easy rollbacks, nearly no downtime due to backup images.

  • Winux Tries to Mimic Windows While Staying Fully Linux

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  • Android integration sounds interesting though.

    It's probably just Waydroid, but rebranded.

  • Nearly all of Spotify has been scraped and is available via torrents

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  • Unless...?

  • Nearly all of Spotify has been scraped and is available via torrents

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  • Everybody starts somewhere. Few come out the gate being Depeche Mode. That doesn't mean it's not worth the struggle to get better.

  • Google Deploying Huge CO2 Battery Facilities with Company Energy Dome

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  • If you want to fight for something, please learn what you stand behind.

    And how do you know I haven't? Do you have insight into my mind?

    Here's my stance: Fuck Google. When have they ever done anything for the benefit of humanity? If this turns out to do exactly what it says on the tin, I'll be happy to eat my words, but pardon me if I don't believe that Google is suddenly interested in clean energy.

  • Google Deploying Huge CO2 Battery Facilities with Company Energy Dome

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  • Great. So we'll waste energy capturing and compressing a useless gas, then we'll just release that into the atmosphere when it's capitalistically convenient? Brilliant. Great work, Google. You've really gone green. /s

  • The Algorithm Finally Works For You

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  • Human digital interfaces aren't a secret, but other things like remote-viewing, etc. have been known about for a long time, and they were failures. There's even a whole movie about it called Men Who Stare At Goats. Pointing to a few examples of actual conspiracies or weird projects doesn't mean every claim has validity. It just means the government is generally untrustworthy, but that also means you need to take each claim individually, in practice. You can't just generalize and say that "government untrustworthy, therefore believe the opposite of anything they say." That's being reactive, not skeptical.

    That's not to say that there's not scary tech out there (it's been demonstrated that they can not only see but hear conversations through walls by interpolating Wi-Fi signals), but it's all very much within the realm of science, not the paranormal.

  • The Algorithm Finally Works For You

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  • It's not just the money. It's the knowledge and expertise needed to use the algorithms, at all...Not everyone has the time, energy, and attention to learn that stuff.

    I agree. That does not mean that LLMs are leveling the playing field with people who can't/won't get an education regarding computer science (and let's not forget that most algorithms don't just appear; they're crafted over time). LLMs are easy, but they are not better or even remotely equivalent. It's like saying, "Finally, the masses can tell a robot to build them a table," and saying that the expertise of those "elite" woodworkers is no longer needed.

    ...damn if I am tired of having to rely on "Zillow and a prayer" if I want to get a house or apartment.

    And this isn't a problem LLMs can solve. I feel for you, I do. We're all feeling this shit, but this is a capitalism problem. Until the ultracapitalists who are making these LLMs (OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, Anthropic, Palantir, etc.) are no longer the drivers of machine learning, and until the ultracapitalist companies stop using AI or algorithms to decide who gets what prices/loans/rental rates/healthcare/etc., we will not see any kind of level playing field you or the author are wishing for.

    You're looking at AI, ascribing it features and achievements it doesn't deserve, then wishing against all the evidence that it's solving capitalism. It's very much not, and if anything, it's only exacerbating the problems caused by it.

    I applaud your optimism—I was optimistic about it once, too—but it has shown, time and again, that it won't lead to a society not governed by the endless chasing of profits at the expense of everyone else; it won't lead to a society where the billionaires and the rest of us compete on equal footing. What we regular folk have gotten from them will not be their undoing.

    If you want a better society where you don't have to claw the most meager of scraps from the hand of the wealthy, it won't be found here.

  • The Algorithm Finally Works For You

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  • Okay. Claims are not evidence. "I read it somewhere" is not even close to substantial, because anyone can write anything they want on the Internet. Without evidence or even consensus amongst experts, it just sounds like a conspiracy theory.

    The CIA is often the bogeyman, because they do lots in secret, and the government is inherently untrustworthy. That doesn't mean they have wireless brain interfaces, however.

  • LLVM Considering An AI Tool Policy, AI Bot For Fixing Build System Breakage Proposed

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  • The main maintainer of curl recently encountered a similar thing. Some users had used their own models to find and report hundreds of potential errors (and were open about using those tools when asked). After review, the maintainers incorporated around 40% of the suggested fixes, some being actual breaks and some being semantic QoL fixes. He was surprised that an AI might actually be useful for something like that.

    But in the whole process, there was a human reviewing and checking the work. At no point were these fixes just taken as gospel, and even the reporters were using their own specialized models for this task. I think introducing AI-powered analysis isn't necessarily a bad thing, but relying upon public models and cutting out humans anywhere in the review and application process is a recipe for disaster.

  • The Algorithm Finally Works For You

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  • No they're not. That's just the claptrap the billionaire Tech Bros want you to believe in. "Ooo, AGI is just around the corner! Buy in now to get it first! Ooo!"

    They just have access to militarized versions through specialized LoRAs and no restraints. It's not anything beyond what's possible for regular people right now, it's just that regular people will never get access to the kind of training data needed to achieve the same results (not that the government should be able to, either).