ilinamorato

@ilinamorato@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is likely to happen when/if trump dies?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  In my opinion, the best case scenario is that the GOP dies (it happened with the Whigs!) and a new, more progressive party (maybe DemSoc) becomes relevant to the left of the Democrats. The Dems become the new Conservatives (since they basically are anyway) and the left wing becomes the moderate left. The overperformance of Abughazeleh (even though she didn’t win) and the shocking effectiveness of Mamdani now that he’s in office make this slightly less impossible than it would’ve seemed even a year ago.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is likely to happen when/if trump dies?⁩ ⁨⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  There is a long list of politicians who have tried to do the Trump thing ever since the stupid escalator. Florida Governor DeSantis made a tiny little bit of headway that ultimately collapsed around him, Marge Greene has been setting herself up as the post-Maga maga leader, and Ted Cruz of Texas has been trying for the longest time to position himself as heir apparent of the current GOP, but there hasn’t been anyone who has been able to capture the same spectrum of blind devotion to grudging acceptance that Donald Trump has somehow managed to unite into the Maga movement.

  JD Vance certainly isn’t it, and while he’ll certainly get the Oval Office when Trump dies before completing his term, I think his presidency will be fairly unremarkable and rather short, and afterwards he’ll move into private equity consulting or some such and never be seen in politics again.

  But without Joe Rogan and Charlie Kirk, and with a ton of the other influencers either jumping ship or losing face, I don’t think we’ll see the same focus on a single candidate again. Since 2016, we’ve had a historical alignment of domestic influence and foreign interference that focused on Trump specifically, and he has used that (as he always does) to build the Trump brand and only the Trump brand. Nobody else can use it; not even Don Jr., who has tried dipping his toes in and mostly been ignored.

  So I think the answer is, the maga cult sputters and dies. Maybe it sticks around long enough to poison the waters for a couple more election cycles, but it won’t elect another president. The best case scenario, in my mind, would be maga breaking away from the GOP and trying to field candidates for a few years that become spoilers.

  Either way, the Republicans will eventually put the mask back on and try to pretend like nothing ever happened (though I can’t possibly predict whether that’ll work. My gut says yes, but maybe that’s just me being cynical).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PwC will say goodbye to staff who aren't convinced about AI⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Hey, fyi, this is called spam, and it invariably backfires every time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PwC will say goodbye to staff who aren't convinced about AI⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You must adhere to my religion or you will no longer be working for this company.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Asset reuse in videogames is essential, and we need to embrace it, says Assassin's Creed and Far Cry director: 'We redo too much stuff'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Ok wait what? Was the game not called Concord? What’s Wildlight? I’m confused.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Asset reuse in videogames is essential, and we need to embrace it, says Assassin's Creed and Far Cry director: 'We redo too much stuff'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, for sure. Definitely agreed. However, the specific examples cited in the article could’ve been done better. You can modify existing assets to make them less-obviously reused.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Face scanning and age verification is the big new privacy invading feature of this decade. Meanwhile almost every single iPhone user has given away all of that for years, just to unlock their phone.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That has been audited by third parties around the world. I detest Apple’s business practices, and even I know this ain’t it chief.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hisense TVs force owners to watch intrusive ads when switching inputs, visiting the home screen, or even changing channels — practice infuriates consumers, brand denies wrongdoing⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  No, this is different. They’re not saying “we’re allowed to,” they’re saying “we didn’t do it”:

  In no circumstance did the test affect the standard functionality of the device nor did it limit access to its main features. The users could and can continue to normally use all HDMI inputs, external devices, consoles, subscription streaming apps, or standard broadcasts without any type of interruption or obligation to watch advertisements.

  Which is totally believable. /s

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I fundamentally disagree with both your premise and your example’s conclusion. I’m not saying that it can be justified, though; just that it must be contextualized differently. To wit: it would be right for you to criticize them even if you are being hypocritical. You have far fewer resources to dispose of that oil. Your business model is not predicated upon handling oil well. You are not enriching yourself at the cost of others. And yes, there may be others doing it as well, but the combined impact of every individual doing it is almost certainly a tiny fraction of the company doing it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not really beside the point, from most reasonable perspectives. A multi-billion-dollar company enriching itself on the backs of starving authors so that it can go on enriching itself on the backs of its users is significantly different from a small number of comparatively destitute individuals stealing some temporary enjoyment for themselves. They are both wrong, but the discussion is utterly useless if you don’t talk about the harm involved and who benefits.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a pretty big difference in scale, and the perpetrator, and whether or not they’re benefiting monetarily, and much more.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft patents system for AI helpers to finish games for you⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Games already have this. There’s almost always a difficulty setting, and one of those settings in newer games is often “story only.” You make decisions, but your character executes the fast-twitch stuff itself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3214: Electric Vehicles⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Solid choice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3214: Electric Vehicles⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To be clear, I do think they should make noise, yes please. Totally agreed. When they’re moving slowly enough that people can get out of the way (and the tire noise is a little less significant), they should be making an artificial sound.

  Also, Space Invaders sounds would be an amazing choice; along the same lines, the Pac-Man “wakka-wakka-wakka” would be awesome, especially if you have a yellow car. Come to think of it, the Fozzie Bear “wokka wokka!” would be hilarious, too.

  I just think allowing people to choose a sound that’s automatically blasted at loud volume from their car at any given time is something we’ve already had a lot of experience with, given that stereo systems have been standard on cars for decades now; and we can be certain that people can’t be trusted with it–especially when they themselves can’t hear it. There are absolutely people who will use that power to broadcast ads, or their own recorded voice shouting obscenities, or a high-pitched screech sound that harms people’s hearing.

  Or, even worse, they’ll change the sound to silence or something super quiet. Maybe to be malicious, but probably more so just because they find it annoying in some niche situation (like in their garage or whatever).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3214: Electric Vehicles⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I want to be able to choose my own noise (being fully aware why that is a bad idea more broadly). Can you imagine driving through the grocery store parking lot making a TIE fighter sound?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I am a 15-year-old girl. Let me show you the vile misogyny that confronts me on social media every day⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s fair. She’ll get it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I am a 15-year-old girl. Let me show you the vile misogyny that confronts me on social media every day⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  the politicians debating online abuse mean well

  Let me stop you there

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Be Wary of Bluesky⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Fair enough. I guess I’m just overly sensitive to the broad-strokes assumption that any given thing is an AI “smoking gun” since I’m an em dash user.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Be Wary of Bluesky⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  (“it’s not just x, it’s y”, etc.)

  Keep in mind, the AIs learned from us. So that’s a thing in AI responses because humans use that structure. Same with em dashes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'We Thought It Would Be Fun': Nintendo Has a Whole FAQ on Why It's Selling Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen Separately for $20 Each - IGN⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  OMG, a Pokemon All Stars would be amazing. But I do want them to get fancy with it: with every new game that starts, make me start with a starter as usual, but once I get access to trading, let me pull Pokemon that are below the soft level cap out of my boxes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Star Trek: Starfleet Academy actor Kareem Diané decides to do their AMA on Lemmy!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Not even kidding, I think the fediverse is how message boards work on starships in Trek. Each ship has their own server, and as they pass within subspace range of one another, they federate. Probably most people even think it’s called “fediverse” because it’s how the Federation chats.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Japanese flag is a too-scale map of the solar system.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Hey, it’s still rising, it’s just like 11am.

  “Why’s it red then?” Uh…smog?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla Robotaxis Reportedly Crashing at a Rate That's 4x Higher Than Humans⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Username checks out

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla Robotaxis Reportedly Crashing at a Rate That's 4x Higher Than Humans⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, people are dying. Including the people who didn’t pay for it. So, kind of a bigger deal than that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I want to know more of the breen.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I look some clips of Star Trek Discovery but I didn’t like the first episode of the series

  It changed so much in between episode one and the season featuring the Breen that I’m honestly not sure you’d recognize it.

  Your mileage may vary about whether it’s better, but it’s absolutely different.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Young gamers in Japan may not be forming the same attachment to Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest because modern dev cycles are as long as their childhood, users theorize - AUTOMATON WEST⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think I buy this worldwide, honestly. Case in point: one of the most popular video game series for young people recently has been Five Nights at Freddy’s, and that series dropped its first four games in eleven months, and its next four games in four years. Minecraft remains one of the most popular games in the world, and it’s releasing full free content drops every few months. Pokemon is still insanely popular among kids, and there hasn’t been a year without a new Pokemon game release since 2015.

  So, yeah. Hey, kids like novelty. Who knew?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are people disconnecting or destroying their Ring cameras?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  people were shocked that banks are businesses trying to maximize profits like any other business.

  Because every ad they see talks about how respectable and responsible they are. Like I said above, they’ve spent billions trying to cultivate this level of obliviousness in their customers.

  Still even if people are so ignorant that they are unaware of privacy issues, they have chosen to be willfully ignorant, because this issue has been talked about non stop for decades. For nothing to sieve in at some point, you have to be a special kind of willfully ignorant.

  In our sphere, sure. But most people don’t live in our sphere. Most people don’t mainline tech news and privacy updates. A lot of “normal people” (i.e. people you meet dropping your kids off at school, or in line at the supermarket, or on a bus) would have trouble telling you the name of the company that made the phone they stare at for seventeen hours a day. Some of the smartest, most world-aware people I know couldn’t tell you the difference between “encrypted” and “password-protected.” The stuff that breaks through into the mainstream are the huge breaches, but the problem is always spun to be the hackers, or one guy in the IT department who did something wrong, or whatever, not the fact that they’re even collecting all of this data in the first place.

  And this isn’t willful ignorance, it’s just not something they think applies to them. Maybe they bought the “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear” line, but more likely they just don’t actively think about it at all. Like how, if you live inland, you probably rarely worry about tsunamis; they’re simply a reality, and they probably vaguely know about the danger, but they’re a fact of nature, there’s nothing they can do to change it, and it’s not a risk they face personally. That doesn’t make them willfully ignorant, it just means they think it’s something that really only matters to spies or whoever.

  Even people that are very low information on technology, know that the Internet is a source of potential surveillance, and having your info on the internet in any form is a potential for being surveilled.

  But usually only in the abstract. “Oh, as long as I just look for the lock in the top left of the browser, I’m ok.” They think the threat comes from hackers and foreign governments, not companies that make the funny cat meme service.

  Everybody knows that all the big IT companies are trying to gather as much information as they can. And Amazon is right at the top among them.

  No, I think you’re wrong about that, and I think that’s because–again–these companies have spent billions trying to convince people that they aren’t. Even in the rare cases that they do, they have completely the wrong idea about what the threat really is; think about those memes that go around from time to time saying “I hereby declare that Facebook doesn’t own my photos!” or whatever. Zuck doesn’t want their photos, he wants to be able to lock them and their friends in, he wants their personal data, and he wants exclusive, 24/7 access to their eyes so that he can cram personalized ads into them.

  And Amazon? If people have anything against Amazon, it’s probably just “oh, they’re trying to put mom & pop companies out of business!” (Which, in fairness, they are also doing). Do you think the average person knows that they even own Ring and Roomba and AWS? I would submit that a surprisingly large chunk of the population probably doesn’t even know that they own Alexa.

  Not because they’re ignorant, just because (1) it doesn’t matter to them, and (2) they’ve been aggressively propagandized to not care.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are people disconnecting or destroying their Ring cameras?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Question is why they bought a Ring camera in the first place?

  Probably because of marketing.

  There is no way they can have been unaware that these gadgets can be accessed from outside.

  (1) Clearly you’ve not talked to enough people outside the privacy-aware community. Absolutely they can have been unaware of that.

  (2) They may well have known, but not known the scope, or not cared. If you’re having trouble with (for instance) porch pirates, you might not care about the privacy ramifications.

  But it was only when the evidence was put right in their face they finally connected the dots?

  Yes. When you don’t live and breathe this stuff, a lot of times that’s what it takes.

  My mom used to use the same password for every service. It was a ten-letter password that she came up with in 1999, and she essentially never deviated from it; until I typed it in for her on haveibeenpwned and showed how many times it had been leaked. People who don’t care about privacy won’t care until they’re shown how it actually affects them.

  So my answer is quite simple: Because they are stupid,

  Profoundly uncharitable read on the situation. Are you “stupid” if you don’t know what you don’t know? We don’t have classes about this sort of thing in high school or anything. There are billions of dollars going toward telling people that sleazy products are actually great and companies actually care about their well-being, and only neckbeards like us on Lemmy spending $0 to tell them the opposite. If they’re not watching tech news because the regular news is too much, or because they have jobs and families and hobbies, or because they don’t know how to process or parse it, or just because they’re not interested and have never been convinced that they should be, they aren’t stupid, just propagandized.

  and bought a sleazy product from a known sleazy company,

  First of all, “sleazy” is a perfect word for this, and thank you for using it.

  But second, keep in mind that for a lot of people, most companies are still responsible members of society; “pillars of the community,” and generally worthy of trust. It’s not because they’re dumb, it’s because they’ve been propagandized into believing it.

  and when they found out it was in fact as sleazy as could be expected, they figured that maybe they didn’t want to to be voluntarily surveilled anyway.

  People are waking up to the reality of big tech “convenience.” That’s a good thing. Don’t shoot at them for coming to their senses.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨outlawing pedestrians⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The freedom of cars.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s kind of a weird game theory thing, because the industries affected aren’t consistently losing. A decision he makes on Wednesday can help the finance industry but hurt the tech industry, and then he can reverse it on Thursday and now the finance industry is tanking but the insurance industry is up. It’s tough to know who would work together to pull him out of office, because between any two given days, the people who have the money have different opinions on how he’s doing.