TheFogan
@TheFogan@programming.dev
- Comment on why doesnt reddit have a big tech forum competitor? 21 hours ago:
Mainly because they’ve done better at it than the big tech forums have. Bottom line social media is in absurdly hard category for anyone to break into once someone else has a grip. Not sure if you remember google’s huge flop when they tried to step in facebooks terf with google plus (Which I do have to say, from a design and functionality level, was a decade ahead of facebook, but google’s attempt to shove it down everyone’s throats, was horrendous).
Bottom line, if you don’t care about who’s running it, the best social media platform, is the one that everyone’s already using. The existing company has to REALLY fsck it up big time to actually lose that advantage, and the competition has to, at least appear to be a trustworthy company. MS, Google, Facebook etc… would not have a good trust factor if they were to try to make a reddit like website, and reddit’s just not done enough to scare off the common users to leave a power vaccume that will draw an audience bigger than say what we have here on lemmy.
- Comment on Digg’s open beta shuts down after just two months, blaming AI bot spam 2 days ago:
I mean it’s worth saying that the new bots are kind of a different league to the old bots.
- Comment on I don't have money to pay premium to not see ads. What in the world makes you think that I have money to buy what you are advertising me? 3 days ago:
Why do you think some of the most advertised things are… predatory loans and gambling.
Honestly for me the worse of it is, basically on linkedin and similar, people pretending to be recruiters, opening with a fake job posting and asking for your resume, then to follow it up with "Hey you know I don’t think this resume is going to get by, can I put you in contact with my resume company, they will sharpen up your resume for $300. Umm… so yeah, don’t know if you guessed this, but I have no clue when my next paycheck is coming in, this isn’t the time to ask me to drop a large amount of money on something that may not do anything.
- Comment on Microsoft Copilot to hijack your browser... for your own convenience 1 week ago:
eventually I’m sure it will. at least within windows I think it’s safe to assume if it’s on the screen, it’s a candidate for AI control.
- Comment on Windows 12 Reportedly Set for Release This Year as a Fully Modular, Subscription-Based, AI-Focused OS 1 week ago:
Doubly so factoring in it’s right now at a time when, hardware costs are skyrocketing. Getting a PC with the same specs as the one I bought in 2023, is almost double the price today. Even steam machines and consoles are delaying themselves because they can’t find a way to release at a reasonable price point.
Everyone has basically been told “3 months ago was the last time to buy a computer for a while until either the AI bubble pops, or some magical huge increase in manufacturing happens to keep up with demand”. Point is this is literally the worse time in history to tell people to go buy a new PC.
- Comment on Eyes of Iran: How the Islamic Republic secretly monitors citizens in real time 1 week ago:
They’re working their way towards being as bad as we are! and they aren’t as good at marketing to try to convince people it’s to find lost dogs.
- Comment on Either the aliens have listed Earth as a no-contact planet or we are probably alone in the universe. 2 weeks ago:
I mean the obvious thing is, we haven’t come close to finding a loophole to the speed of light speed limit. in the massively tiny portion of the universe we can see, there’s lots of “seems to have water, could possibly support life” planets, but well over 80 light years away (and those are the “close” ones).
Then if we do assume some life forms were to have faster than light travel, we are probably not a “no contact”, but rather “low priority”. To a species that far ahead of us technologically. They’d have access to billions of planets, at which point if life is relatively common, we’d be very un-special.
- Comment on President Donald Trump bans Anthropic from use in government systems 2 weeks ago:
Too inaccurate, Toddler throws a tantrum because someone wouldn’t give him a toy. Anthropic started the contract with the rules in place to begin with.
- Comment on President Donald Trump bans Anthropic from use in government systems 2 weeks ago:
No not really, they are cutting the lesser evil so they can go with the greater evil. In short, Claude won’t fire their weapons for them, so mechahitler gets the trigger.
- Comment on 🐲 mg 2 weeks ago:
True… humans wear adorable hats all the time, yet I’ve never seen a report of a fossilized human found wearing an adorable hat.
- Comment on 🐲 mg 2 weeks ago:
More accurately they didn’t all, ALWAYS wear adorable hats. It very well could be the norm, just not when treking through the tar pits… or just coincidentally the .00001% that actually fosilized in ways to give analysis of soft materials happened to have left their hats at home.
- Comment on The people who believe "progressiveness is just a fad that one grows out of" are the same people that grew up getting brainwashed into regressive politics. The belief is only true for them. 2 weeks ago:
question I guess is, will the trend reverse when education gets worse?
- Comment on How come in American classrooms they make another language an elective. Why not teach our kids as many languages possible that way if we go somewhere we will kind of have uper hand? 2 weeks ago:
I’d say because half of america’s goals involve not understanding other cultures and believing whatever nonsense the corporate overlords want to say about them.
I still have to laugh at when american’s went on chinese tiktok to work around the possible bans, and the chinese were all like “wait, you really do have to pay out the nose for an ambulance ride, I thought that was propoganda by our government” meanwhile a lot of american’s were learning half of the horrors of china were extremely overstated or manipulated.
- Comment on Extreme wealth inequality is baked in to the system 3 weeks ago:
True, but the point of the simulations is basically debunking the idea that even when capitalism “works”. IE the hypothetical perfect scenereo where everyone starts off with the same, has the same chances of getting good and bad opprotunities, that the the fairness systematically fades out of the system the longer the game runs.
I recall an economics class once where they started out playing monopoly, but giving everyone different starting amounts of money… and basically demonstrating that well over 90% of the time… the advantages basically determined the game.
- Comment on Extreme wealth inequality is baked in to the system 3 weeks ago:
Another simulation… that’s mainstream in american society… Landlords Game – IE what’s now Monopoly. By definition everyone starts with the same amount of money, and it ends with one person massively ahead and everyone else going bankrupt.
- Comment on Why is #FFFFFF white, but mixing red green and blue paint is black? 3 weeks ago:
Basically yes, look up additive vs subtractive colors… that’s why for a monitor you need RGB, but ink cartrages are Cyan Magenta and Yellow
In short, colored light, and pigments work in opposite ways. Basically all visible light mixes together to make white light. a blue object, basically absorbs the red and green light, allowing only the blue to bounce back… so mixing more colors, means less light. until almost nothing gets out (hence black).
- Comment on When DinoCon is doing more than the US Gov 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on When DinoCon is doing more than the US Gov 3 weeks ago:
Sadly there’s a lot of intelectuals that were involved, Lawrence Krauss, Noem Chomsky, Steven Hawking just scratching the surface.
- Comment on Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest Unwittingly Reveal the Severity of the U.S. Surveillance State 4 weeks ago:
The point is whether or not it happens, as a parable it’s validity is sound. Point is, if even if the current government has nothing but good intentions and would never use the information to do anything you don’t agree with, and you are in perfect agreement with the current government. There is always the risk of either the government changing or someone stealing the information from the government that could weaponize it in ways you would never want.
- Comment on How are locks and keys mass produced? 4 weeks ago:
2 fronts I’d say.
- Yeah it makes it clear someone breaking in, was doing the effort to conciously get into something that he wasn’t permitted to rather than just, opened the wrong door.
Also would point out, low knowledge low effort crooks, really 9/10 situations there’s an easier way to get in than the lock. Your house is far more likely to be broken in by someone smashing a window rather than picking a lock.
- Comment on it's true 5 weeks ago:
As Mitch Hedberg would say
They used to use it
they still do.
But they used to, too!
- Comment on How come decades in the 1900s look fairly well differentiated but from like 2004 on feels like a giant run on? 5 weeks ago:
I think there’s a bit of that, but also a bit of… unsubtle enshittification. I mean the obvious, AI features that nobody likes getting crammed into everything. Apples Intelligence making siri unable to do simple tasks it used to be able to do easily.
A lot of people would be happy to pay premium price for things that do exactly what they want. But more and more software companies are reversing what they do… and even when they do what you want, you still have to be vigilant on them changing their minds and removing features, or adding subscription costs etc…
- Comment on 'Fake it till you make it' insinuates fakers stop being fake, once they make it; reality seems to suggest otherwise 5 weeks ago:
Well depends, I think some industries just are fake in general,
Chiropractors, stock traders that aren’t using insider information etc…
- Comment on The one tool more effective than censorship is noise 5 weeks ago:
Yeah honestly I feel that’s the universal problem the world in general has.
What’s worse, our “vetted” sources have all been compromised. Mainstream news is corrupt as hell… all owned by a tiny portion of rich assholes. As trust in them wanes, the focus moves to the “independent” creators on youtube, and instagram influencers, podcastors etc…
Of which many of them are actually getting paid by the same billionares, as scandal after scandal shows, and of course rich monstrocities like Meta, Google, Musk… have the power to signal boost the ones they want to, and to minimize the growth of ones they don’t.
- Comment on The rise of Moltbook suggests viral AI prompts may be the next big security threat 5 weeks ago:
Did they actually honor it? I recall quite a few people tricking AIs into like, saying they will sell a car for $1, but the company not honoring it.
- Comment on The rise of Moltbook suggests viral AI prompts may be the next big security threat 5 weeks ago:
You know, in IT security, the weakest link will always be the users… they are easy to fool, they just blindly trust whatever you tell them.
But now, thanks to AI, computers will finally catch up to humans in their ability to be tricked. No longer will you need human users to set their password to easy things to remember. Our new AIs will actually be capable of shortening their encryption key to a common name, and leaving them on post it notes on their desks.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
I guess my point is federated services, at least prior to a world where they become mainstream, are only particularly good if
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You have a group of people all willing to use them together (IE Matrix, Friendster etc…), Join as a group don’t expect to find other specific individuals.
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If you do want to meet people, you are looking for pretty broad categories encompass millions. IE on lemmy you can certainly find an anime community, you won’t find an active jujitsu kaisen community.
Anyway so my point on things like Dating, Linked In etc… those topics are likely to be the last to have a hope in the federation, because their services on their own, require users, but more importantly those users have to be localized (IE dating sites need, both a high volume of users, and those users need to be in close geographical proximity, and have some reasonable male to female ratio, and then have some level of common interests). A linked in needs… job seekers, and companies/head hunters. Of which you can’t expect companies to put in resources without a large userbase… and you can’t expect the userbase to grow without company usage.
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- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Is there even really a function for linkedin without… well what it is? The last people to adopt new and open source tech are… corporate executives, and to my knowledge the whole point of linked in is, a psudo job hunting web page, with some social media pages as a secondary (of which people are only going to be posting “work hard” and “I work hard” kind of messages because… well they’d never post something that might make them less attractive to employers.
- Comment on Has ICE negatively affecting the protection money income of US organised crime? 1 month ago:
Actually I imagine the biggest thing of the “protection money” racket concept… to my understanding that requires being the most dangerous thing in the area. While the obvious concept of protection money is it’s to prevent the group you are paying from robbing you… it is kind of protection in the sense that a small time crook wants to rob stores in a mafia controlled area, the mob will go after him.
I’d imagine an army sized groups breaking down doors etc… means paying the mob ain’t that good of a deal.
Also I’d say… I’m pretty sure most organized crime, has their own code of morals. Ice thug may be outside many of their standards.
- Comment on How does capitalism differ from crony capitalism? 1 month ago:
Would TRUE capitalism have any problems?
Well only a TRUE Scottsman could tell you how TRUE capitalism works.
But OK so in short the gist of theory in capitalism.
Free market ideas - IE capitalism with no government oversite. If a company makes shitty products, someone else will make a less shitty product and all consumers will switch, or if a company starts dumping toxic waste into the drinking water, people would figure it out and stop buying that product… Parts of it are kind of a pipe dream because, some products are inherantly expensive to get started in. Lets face it, Facebook, Windows etc… aren’t dominant because their products are the best, pretty sure you could poll their userbase and find abysmal satisfaction among them. Yet even a giant as big as google, can’t accomplish the resources needed to compete in those markets… let alone a startup out of nowhere.
Now regulations obviously that’s where crony vs regulated comes up in discussion.
Obviously to me the big part is, safety matters. First off the bat, information, consumers can’t even make decisions if they don’t know. If you are putting poison in food, or calling something healthy when it’s loaded with crap, consumers have to know that.
Environmental is a bigger problem. Obviously requiring you to shield and not leak toxins into the drinking water… is a big problem, and it creates a huge problem, as the companys selling gas, or manufacturing chemicals etc… that spend less on safety are at a huge advantage in pricing to the consumer, who can’t tell why the more ethical companies are so expensive, only that they are more expensive. But the more safety that’s required, the higher the bar to entry is…