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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: October 27th, 2023

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  • @anotherspinelessdem@lemmy.ml

    @workgood@lemmy.dbzer0.com

    Google is perversely incentivized to send traffic to sites using their ad placement services creating demand for what they are supplying.

    Sending someone searching for information to sites without ads enshitifying the experience breaks the business model Google depands on.

    Now scraping the content to use in “AI summaries” without attribution? That seems likely.







  • @adarza@lemmy.ca

    @Confidant6198@lemmy.ml I thought we were finally making progress with Rank Choice Voting starting to gain traction, but agree… there may not be enough left to salvage after this unless the MAGA movement collapses before the midterms… assuming we still are have elections and people other than white land owners can vote. Still not entirely sure how far back Trump supporters need to go for the “again” point when America was great.

    MAGA are NOT the majority of Americans, but sadly they only slightly exceed the Americans who don’t vote at all. While not the government many Americans wanted, when “I’m not into politics” stopped resulting in an immediate response of “so you aren’t American?”, we ended up with the government we deserve.




  • @juergen@feddit.org “Fuck Elon” is becoming the punch buggy of this generation.

    Combine a toxic brand with a level of ridiculously poor Quality Control we haven’t seen from a US automaker since the Saturn brand, and you get a price point/distressd asset that PE will be looking at. They’ve already calculated the value of selling Tesla for parts and just waiting for the stock to hit a number to act. Elon is so over leveraged, there will be nothing he can do to stop it.


  • @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone

    @yogthos@lemmy.ml @Xanza@lemm.ee there ARE city owned fiber and wireless networks. The dark fiber bought up in the early 2Ks to form the existing Internet2 that connects Research 1 universities and many other non-commercial entities is also real.

    You CAN in fact communicate using open standards like DNS, SMTP or even ActivityPub between some points without using a service or network owned by a billionaire. What you CANNOT do is communicate without hardware made by billionaires. Even if you did manage to create a compute device using open hardware to create and consume the communication, traffic over that fiber is being routed with some very expensive, very proprietary hardware.

    My point is that it IS possible and there have been a few people who are not only NOT lazy, but visionary thinkers motivated by more that greed building protocols, tools and networks.

    DNS, TCP/IP and HTTP were all designed to function if large parts of the network were no longer available. They were more concerned with nuclear war at the time, but the design works just as well to route around walled gardens.

    I agree that most people are too lazy to care… let alone take any action to change the status quo, but here we are discussing this through MBin/Lemmy./ActivityPub.

    https://www.lightwaveonline.com/business/article/16657705/level-3-inks-dark-fiber-deal-with-internet2






  • @astrsk@fedia.io

    @HK65@sopuli.xyz @normalexit@lemmy.world @GreenKnight23@lemmy.world

    The posts you are replying to ha e been deleted. I’m really currious what they said because we have one vendor who claims to be/is locked into usung “master”. This either requires us to write CI that merges main -> master and mirrors master back to main or use master. This can confuse junior devs once or twice, but it is really not an issue. The ONLY time I felt compelled to use master because of this vendor was when working with a group using GitLab. GitLab has a feature called Pull Mirroring that is MUCH more reliable than a pull/mirror action in GitHub that does the same thing, but to use that the branch names had to be the same.

    I see both sides of this argument. The master/slave relationship in tech is NOT like masterworks or mastering a craft. It is based on one “owning” the other, but I don’t think that allowing technology to work that way is violating its rights. Obviously changing the name doesn’t change the behavior and isn’t it really only when that behavior is applied to people that we have a problem with it?

    I never fully supported the effort required to change, but I’ve also never written anything in a way it would be difficult to change. I recognize that it could be considered a micro aggression, but it’s not like we are going to stop ants or bees from treating other classes as forced labor. Slavery exists. It is bad when applied to people. It accurately describes tech. Changing the name of the master db or branch did NOT free the slaves.




  • @anzo@programming.dev this comment originally posted on a Reddit ELI5 thread might be a better starting point for people who aren’t familiar with Aaron’s legacy and the controversy around his death.

    I’ll actually try to explain this like you’re five, because that doesn’t ever seem to happen on here anymore.

    Aaron Swartz was a man who was a part of a whoooole lot of really cool things. He helped to make a thing called “RSS” which helps people learn all the stuff they want to without going to all the different websites that that takes. It’s like if you want to make a sandwich, but normally you’d have to go to a bread store, a meat store, a cheese store, and a vegetable store. RSS makes it so you can get that all at once (and enjoy your sandwich much more easily).

    Aaron also was part of a group of guys who helped give out information from “PACER”, which is a big system full of information about what happened at courts. But, even though all of this information should have been free, they charged people for it. Imagine if each time you asked your teacher a question you had to pay a quarter. Even though that’s their job, and it should be free, they made you pay. Well that sure did make some law-people mad. They started to investigate Aaron, but eventually stopped when they realized Aaron was right.

    Aaron did some more stuff, too. You know this website you’re on? Aaron was a big part of it at the very beginning. A lot of people call him one of the founders, but that’s not entirely true. What is true is that Aaron helped to shape and mold and make this website what it is today. It’s like when mommy buys you Play-Doh. She actually started it, but you’re the one that made the amazing sculpture out of it (with help from your friends, of course).

    Aaron also did something that made some people pretty mad. You see Aaron thought that information should be very free. He though that people like you, and me, and everyone else should be able to read as much information as we could on stuff. He thought that the work that scientists did at colleges should be seen by everyone! So he went to MIT to access JSTOR, basically a virtual library of science, and went “out of bounds” according to MIT. He went somewhere he wasn’t supposed to go, and went there to try to get all this information and science from JSTOR, which he was actually allowed to do. The problem was like this though. Imagine Aaron went to the library. He can check out as many books as he wants, right? What Aaron wanted to do was check out every book, and make sure that everyone around the world had the same chance to read them that he did. But in order to check out those books, he had to go behind the desk, which was a no-no.

    So what happened is that Aaron got in trouble with JSTOR, the library, and with MIT, who is pretty much the librarian. Eventually, JSTOR decided they didn’t think Aaron did anything wrong, and didn’t want to try anymore. MIT was a little slower though, and didn’t say much. Then the US Attorney’s office came in. They’re like the cops that might come to the library. The owners of the library didn’t think that you did anything wrong, and wanted the cops to leave. The librarian didn’t answer as quickly though, so the cops stuck around and kept asking Aaron questions and checking through his pockets for stuff.

    This whole thing was very scary for Aaron. Aaron didn’t have a whole lot of money, and if he got in as much trouble as the cops wanted to put him in, he would have to give it all up, and go to prison for a long time. This scared Aaron a lot. This was especially tough for Aaron because he had been really sad for quite some time. It was a special kind of sad that doesn’t go away with a tight hug from mom, so it was especially hard to deal with.

    On Friday, Aaron hung himself. Some people think it was because he was so scared of the cops that he just couldn’t deal with it. Some people think it was because he was so sad that he just wanted it to go away. But most people think it was a combination of the two.

    There are a lot of people talking about it now though, because if the cops hadn’t been so mean to Aaron, he’d probably still be alive today. This makes people very sad and very angry, because Aaron was a very smart, very kind person. We wanted him to stay around much longer than he did, and now we want to make sure that nothing like what happened to Aaron will happen to anyone else again.