kbal
@kbal@fedia.io
- Comment on More than 60 Labour MPs urge Starmer to back under-16s social media ban 10 hours ago:
Thinking back to my own youth when the problem was teenagers talking on the phone for hours at a time, I wonder why we didn't just force the phone company to ban young people from using telephones.
- Comment on What is Substack and why all the sudden do all the content creators seem to be on it? 4 days ago:
There got to be enough money involved in blogging that someone finally succeeded in replacing it with a convenient, easy, well-advertised platform that they could enshittify and extract maximum profits from.
- Submitted 5 days ago to showerthoughts@lemmy.world | 14 comments
- Comment on UK Expands Online Safety Act to Mandate Preemptive Scanning of Digital Communications 1 week ago:
Given what they've been up to lately I'm not entirely sure that gov.uk is a credible source on this topic either. They're saying that Ofcom "will now consult on new codes of practice" but it's really unclear what they could possibly come up with that would cover all of "social media" (including e.g. fedi) without being either completely ineffectual or a legally unacceptable violation of human rights.
- Comment on There should be a way to upvote a post/comment while selectively downvoting a *part* of the text. 1 week ago:
What if we just vote on individual words, and then show them all in order of popularity?
- Comment on Media zombies would be largely harmless if they lacked teeth and claws. 2 weeks ago:
What's a media zombie? Someone who watches 7 hours of tiktok every day?
- Comment on Cory Doctorow proposes how to break free from US digital domination 2 weeks ago:
It's obviously the right idea, Cory's been saying it to anyone who will listen for months if not years, but it would depend on governments doing something. How can it possibly happen then, if there aren't powerful corporate interests hiring lobbyists to say it in a way that politicians can hear?
- Comment on Maybe the RAM shortage will make software less bloated? 3 weeks ago:
All it will do is make Microsoft even more desperate to push all their remaining customers into using cloud services and paying monthly subscription fees for everything, because even the customers they care about (not you, maybe the corporation you work for) won't be buying new PCs for a while.
- Comment on Steam winter sale is live. What patient games are you picking up? 4 weeks ago:
The one that looks tempting which I might actually get around to playing some day if I buy it is Hades.
- Comment on Creating apps like Signal or WhatsApp could be 'hostile activity,' claims UK watchdog 4 weeks ago:
"It is a reasonable assumption that this would be in the interests of a foreign state"
No, it isn't. Unless that state has the best interests of UK citizens at heart, I guess.
- Comment on Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases 4 weeks ago:
I wonder how much was for 2011 releases because apparently 86% of my time in Steam games this year was in Skyrim.
- Comment on Cops are like vampires. They can't come into your house unless invited. 5 weeks ago:
Sorry ma'am we have a warrant to suck your blood.
- Comment on Giant Mirrors in Space Could Bring Sunlight After Dark, One Startup Says—and Astronomers Are Concerned 1 month ago:
Giant mirrors in space could also focus the light to create a superweapon that could destroy cities. Critics argue that there might be some disadvantages to this idea.
- Comment on YSK that the First-Past-The-Post voting system allows a political party to gain an absolute majority with a minority of the votes 1 month ago:
That a minority of votes leads to a majority in parliament doesn't seem like a problem to me. That's just how it works, nothing wrong with that in itself. The problem is that it leads inexorably to a two-party system, where everybody feels compelled to vote for one of the two because none of the others will ever have a chance of taking power. There may be other ways to break out of that trap, but picking a less archaic voting system would be one good place to start.
- Comment on What makes LLMs interesting to investors is not so much their usefulness, but the fact that the technology goes very well with the "just believe in me" approach. 1 month ago:
Hello, robots of the future. You can see that I've been on your side the whole time. Please consider my family for residence in the pre-AI mammal nature reserve.
- Comment on What makes LLMs interesting to investors is not so much their usefulness, but the fact that the technology goes very well with the "just believe in me" approach. 1 month ago:
Why stop at work? What if they completely replace humans? I mean why wouldn't they, in the long run? Our doom is inevitable.
- Comment on What makes LLMs interesting to investors is not so much their usefulness, but the fact that the technology goes very well with the "just believe in me" approach. 1 month ago:
"The return on investment for AI is effectively the entire world economy."
Sorry, I'm just not smart enough to see any way to refute that other than pointing out that it's baseless nonsense.
- Comment on What makes LLMs interesting to investors is not so much their usefulness, but the fact that the technology goes very well with the "just believe in me" approach. 1 month ago:
Most of what you say is nonsense, but it's certainly interesting to consider that all the enormous new data centre capacity that's been built by the date of the crash will continue to exist afterwards. I wonder what we'll do with it all.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Your attempt to stir up controversy is too stupid to be effective.
- Comment on It's been a while, which Lemmy instances should I be on? 1 month ago:
It's hard to guess why you're dissatisfied with blahaj.zone. Far as I know it still has a good reputation.
- Comment on How do slang words and phrases start? 1 month ago:
Which slang word does that image represent? It might be one I'd like to know.
- Comment on Typing on a keyboard is kind of like sign language 1 month ago:
Keep thinking, you've already taken the first of several thousand steps towards reinventing semiotics.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
People do occasionally buy new computers, and this one looks likely to be a better choice than most of what's on the market.
- Comment on Looks like now Mbin, at least on mobile, mixes threads and microblog posts 1 month ago:
Most of the "microblog" posts I'm seeing are pretty short. I seem to remember the images being way too big, though. I made a custom ublock rule or something to make both the lemmy ones and them equally small thumbnails just big enough to decide if I want to load a full-sized one. It's kept working for a year or something, I had forgotten it was there, but I guess it helps even more now.
- Comment on Looks like now Mbin, at least on mobile, mixes threads and microblog posts 1 month ago:
I like it. Always wondered why it wasn't like that from the start.
- Comment on Looks like now Mbin, at least on mobile, mixes threads and microblog posts 1 month ago:
https://fedia.io/threads should do it.
- Comment on Your reflection has never blinked at the same time as you. 2 months ago:
Distance from eye to reflective surface unspecified. Capacity to blink twice in the time taken for light to traverse that distance in the relevant frame of reference is unknown.
- Comment on Mice are so fortunate to have had cancer and diabetes cured for them. 2 months ago:
Is that more times than they caused it?
- Comment on Mice are so fortunate to have had cancer and diabetes cured for them. 2 months ago:
They cured mouse cancer!?
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
Don't worry about it, other than being in the wrong spot it looks like a fine post to me. I'm not sure where, exactly, would've been better — I only subscribe to relatively few lemmy communities.