MangoCats
@MangoCats@feddit.it
- Comment on Why can't we go back to small phones? 1 week ago:
Not to mention: the old people (the ones with money) can’t see them.
- Comment on Why can't we go back to small phones? 1 week ago:
Flip phones with 7 day battery life, including 20 hours of talk time?
- Comment on The future of the internet is likely smaller communities, with a focus on curated experiences 1 week ago:
This is a story about my web3 thoughts, circa 2018…
- Comment on The future of the internet is likely smaller communities, with a focus on curated experiences 1 week ago:
Smaller communities don’t get targeted for commercial exploitation. But, then, something has to support them even if they don’t cost much to run - they still cost something, both for bandwidth/storage and moderation/curation effort.
- Comment on The future of the internet is likely smaller communities, with a focus on curated experiences 1 week ago:
Not all of Reddit works, but some of it does for some people, and the reason it works for them is because the moderators shape communities that the community members enjoy participating in.
Personally, I think active communities below the Dunbar number (about 150) in size are some of the most rewarding to participate in, long term. But, there are always a lot of people who flock to wherever the biggest crowds are.
- Comment on The future of the internet is likely smaller communities, with a focus on curated experiences 1 week ago:
I think it’s always going to be a sort of long-tail phenomenon, with most people involved in the biggest platforms, but a large number of small platforms that attract a minority of the overall population.
- Comment on After 40 years of being free Microsoft has added a paywall to Notepad 2 weeks ago:
Install time? Startup time? Useless bloat?
- Comment on HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback' 2 weeks ago:
The ultimate answer:
They have been making these things for decades, they know how to make them better, they know how to make them more durable, they know how to making them even simpler to use and fix, they choose not to, for profit. That should be structurally discouraged.
Charge the manufacturers for the FULL, REAL environmental impact of shipping materials and end of life disposal of their products. Yes, that cost will be passed to the consumers, as it should be. It also rewards sale of more durable goods.
- Comment on Google is on the Wrong Side of History. 3 weeks ago:
you can also solve your examole choice by gun grabbing ans shooting the guy if he lets you take it.
Ah, but that wouldn’t be mutually beneficial, would it?
Also, this didn’t take long:
Some federal employees who accepted Trump’s buyout offer are now being notified that their buyout has been denied, and they are being terminated instead.
- Comment on Google is on the Wrong Side of History. 3 weeks ago:
Here’s a gun to your head, now, it would be beneficial to you to hand over your wallet m’kay?
No bullet in your brain, more cash in my hand, both parties benefit! See how that works?
Oh, you have a lump growing in your thyroid, mmmm… that is bad. We can cut that out for you and most people we do that to live a lot longer, but first we need you to mortgage your home and give us the proceeds. See how that works?
- Comment on Reddit Blames Google Algorithm Changes For Not Hitting User Growth. 3 weeks ago:
spez has too much money to care.
What’s the point of being Uberwealthy if you can’t just do whatever you want, whenever you want?
People keep quoting that Musk gave DT $250million to support his campaign, like hell… Musk bought Twitter and ran it into the ground to support DT’s campaign, that was far more significant, and far more costly than a mere $250M.
- Comment on In light of recent events, here's OpenStreetMap editors discussing naming of the Gulf of Mexico 3 weeks ago:
Oh, hell yeah. My parents got 4 and 6 year college degrees based off the income of a teacher, hairdresser, mechanic, and night watchman.
- Comment on In light of recent events, here's OpenStreetMap editors discussing naming of the Gulf of Mexico 3 weeks ago:
I could see myself wanting to own multiple private islands, getting Larry Ellison to sell me Lanai is going to take a lot of money.
- Comment on In light of recent events, here's OpenStreetMap editors discussing naming of the Gulf of Mexico 3 weeks ago:
Current U.S. leadership: Our billionaires are gonna be bigger than all the other billionaires in the world put together. (I honestly believe there’s an insecurity motive there: if US billionaires don’t amass significantly more wealth, they won’t be competitive in the billionaire world against outside billionaires.)
U.S. Democracy: If one dollar = one vote, I guess we should save all that money we have been wasting on elections.
The real reason for the surge in prosperity of the middle and lower classes after WWII: decimation of the ultra-wealthy throughout the developed world. Remember: the post WWII US income tax on the wealthy was 91% - literal decimation, for those who paid.
- Comment on In light of recent events, here's OpenStreetMap editors discussing naming of the Gulf of Mexico 3 weeks ago:
One way a global index can respect local authority would be for the index to acknowledge that within that territory, there is an official name for things.
They can also be pragmatic and acknowledge a common local name, the a global consensus name, etc.
In many ways, it’s just a further fragmentation like language.
- Comment on The extremely rich would rather not have another Einstein unless they knew they could control them and it wouldn't hurt the bottom line. 3 weeks ago:
That was a company of 1000 employees, over 500 of them in the traveling global sales force. There were about seven guys at the top taking home millions a year in those bonuses, and their whole priority was to maximize their personal incomes as much and as soon as possible.
In the shiny promotional videos, we were all about helping our customers, improving their lives, but in reality we weren’t very good at that, only about 1/3 customers saw any benefits and maybe 3/100 would get anything close to what they were really hoping for, but… they didn’t have any alternatives, so they were willing to let their health insurance pay for a $30K surgical procedure on the chance that they might be one of the lucky ones.
Research around methods of testing to determine who might and who might not benefit from the product? Actively undermined by the company.
Research around ways to improve product performance? Squashed as I described, it was more likely to “disrupt” the short term income streams they leaders were all enjoying than to make any significant improvements in income for them on any time schedule they care about.
- Comment on The extremely rich would rather not have another Einstein unless they knew they could control them and it wouldn't hurt the bottom line. 3 weeks ago:
I have spent 30 years developing computerization of traditional medical tasks. Anytime a project gets anywhere near M.D. territory they villify it mercilessly, it’s a threat to their cash cow, a threat to their status as the exalted font of all knowledge, a threat to their $600K/yr practice income - they think.
- Comment on The extremely rich would rather not have another Einstein unless they knew they could control them and it wouldn't hurt the bottom line. 3 weeks ago:
Doesn’t even have to be about that. Einstein was a disruptor. He scribbled some theories on paper and it dramatically reshaped the global power and wealth dynamic.
The extremely rich have a singular top priority: to stay that way. Unpredictable change, regardless of the net change for good or bad, is not their friend.
This works at all levels. I was hired into the mid level of a company to “lead research to improve the product” - but I quickly found out: that was just a carrot to get me and others like me in the door to fill roles required by regulatory bodies: so many degreed this and thats to oversee implementation of the quality procedures, etc. Everyone above Director level in that company was making fat bonuses every quarter and they didn’t want ANYTHING to change, not even an improvement in the product, it was making plenty of money with no signs of competition on the horizon. To announce a potential future improvement would be to derail current sales volumes, and there were new mansions under construction that still needed more quarters of bonuses to complete.
- Comment on Time to get serious with E2E encrypted messaging 4 weeks ago:
This was outlined 50 years ago as part of Anarchist analysis of the system then. Not exactly an easy read, but “the second watershed” can be equated to “jumping the shark” or “enshittification” or whatever other term you want to apply to: a good thing gone bad due to the business owners switching from serving customers to enriching / empowering themselves:
archive.org/details/illich-conviviality/…/1up
The alternative proposed by Illich to “Radical Monopolies” are “Convivial Tools” which empower individuals instead of central decision makers.
- Comment on Time to get serious with E2E encrypted messaging 4 weeks ago:
I actually tried Tox - maybe 8 years ago now… the real problem with it, or anything similar, is that you need both ends of every conversation to take the trouble to set it up. It was pretty easy to setup, IMO, but… as an example, in 2005 I had an engineer co-worker ask me about “that Linux thing” when I got around to telling him that pretty much everything he used on a daily basis was available in Linux, just under different names than he was used to in Windows “Oh, you mean I’d have to learn different names for Word and Excel and Outlook?” “Uh, yeah.” “Oh, that’s more trouble than I think I want, I’ll just stick with what I know.”
- Comment on Time to get serious with E2E encrypted messaging 4 weeks ago:
In the 1990s US ISPs would “give you” an e-mail account with their service: you@isp.com. Of course, this is insta-lockin for that e-mail address, you can never port it.
Owning your own domain name and running e-mail service through that worked, for a few years, but the big players have made whitelist / blacklist such a frustrating whack-a-mole game in the e-mail space that running your own e-mail server quickly became impractical.
- Comment on Time to get serious with E2E encrypted messaging 4 weeks ago:
Shortcut question: What’s a workable federated e2ee solution that’s available today?
- Comment on 'Meta Torrented over 81 TB of Data Through Anna's Archive, Despite Few Seeders' * TorrentFreak 4 weeks ago:
I agree. Still doesn’t hurt to bring it up on appropriate tangents.
- Comment on 'Meta Torrented over 81 TB of Data Through Anna's Archive, Despite Few Seeders' * TorrentFreak 4 weeks ago:
If the receiving entity then ingests all that copyrighted material into its AI, and the AI sends it piece at a time to other receiving entities, that should be the AI infringing on everything it is copying to make its answers.
- Comment on You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism | Authoritarians and tech CEOs now share the same goal: to keep us locked in an eternal doomscroll instead of organizing against them 4 weeks ago:
Maybe we won’t be guillotining them anytime soon, but we can at least slow their roll: www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVgNJf6CsBA
- Comment on YSK in the U.S., you can buy produce directly from black farmers and they will ship it to you. It can cost less than your supermarket and will piss off people in power. 4 weeks ago:
NorthEast Florida has: www.melanatedgrowersinc.com
