Gray
@Gray@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Meta given 30 days to cease using the name Threads by company that trademarked it 11 years ago 1 year ago:
I always thought it was funny while studying for my Cisco certification that their operating system was also called IOS. I had no idea there was actual drama behind it!
- Comment on FCC announces plans to resurrect net neutrality rules. 1 year ago:
I think it’s easier to understand net neutrality as something ISP’s can’t do rather than something they must do, since we’ve never seen them really act on it before. It just means they can’t speed up or slow down your internet based on what websites you’re visiting. Under bet neutrality, there can never be a deal with Google to give people faster speedsnusing Google searches than Bing or DuckDuckGo searches.
- Comment on Terraria developer bashes Unity, donates $200k to open source alternatives 1 year ago:
If the contractual details of malt distribution were going to affect the quality of beers you were getting then you absolutely would care. Unity’s pay scheme will lead to studios shutting down if there isn’t pushback. Studios switching to a different engine like Godot will make their games feel different for better or for worse and efforts to help fund these alternate engines will help tip the scale towards that being “for better”. But most importantly of all, this is a company using toxic and predatory practices. Regardless of the industry (yes, malt distributors too), if we don’t push back against toxic business practices, then companies will see avenues they can take advantage of to make extra money. This is the reality of capitalism. Whatever methods can turn a profit without generating negative attention will be employed. It’s in the hands of consumers, competing businesses, and the government to keep those toxic practices in check. I mean, why the fuck are we on Lemmy? Ultimately Reddit’s actions are not going to affect the majority of users on their platform. Most of us came here to protest shitty business practices.
- Comment on FTC judge rules Intuit broke law, must stop advertising TurboTax as “free” 1 year ago:
No worries. You’re right that it’s absurd that we need to fight so much for our government to protect us from blatant corporate for-profit schemes. There was a time where even the US government at least did us the honor of pretending to not take bribes like this. The Intuit tax return money machine is such an obviously fixable problem. All my 20-something friends in the US know that this problem only exists because lobbying. It’s disgusting to watch elected representatives become so comfortable with their positions that they feel safe enacting policies that hurt their constituents like this.
- Comment on FTC judge rules Intuit broke law, must stop advertising TurboTax as “free” 1 year ago:
For context, the reason I’m hating on Intuit and H&R Block and encouraging people to use FreeTaxUSA is because the first two are the main culprits behind the extensive lobbying that has led to the US government continuing to require people to file their own taxes rather than modernizing and making this process free and easy. My “gushing” is in the pursuit of changing the broken system you’re pointing out.
- Comment on Are Internet boards and Forums dead 1 year ago:
I know City-Data Forums is still pretty active. I’ve used it a lot when deciding on places to move. I’m also a bit of an urban design nerd and there’s a lot of fascinating discussion I come across there.
- Comment on FTC judge rules Intuit broke law, must stop advertising TurboTax as “free” 1 year ago:
Fuck Intuit and H&R Block, all my homies use FreeTaxUSA.
- Comment on Why shouldn’t firearm manufacturers be held accountable for the use of their weapons in crimes? 1 year ago:
What I don’t like about this argument is it feels like the government trying to pass off their own responsibility to someone else. Like, if guns are so dangerous in purpose that manufacturers should be fined for shootings, then government officials should just be regulating gun ownership to begin with. Like, imagine if instead of criminalizing tobacco because of its dangerous health effects, the government said that anytime a person is caught smoking it tobacco companies get fined. At that point you may as well just outlaw the company itself. Which is fine. I have no problem outlawing gun manufacturing. But this is just a unnecessarily roundabout way of doing that. What are we actually accomplishing if we allow people to be shot and then take action and milk money out of the situation? A responsible government isn’t trying to point fingers after a tragedy like a mass shooting and they certainly aren’t trying to make money off of it. No, a good government takes the necessary direct steps to prevent those tragedies from happening again, especially if it’s a common occurrence. No need to dance around a solution instead of tackling it head on.
- Comment on The internet has become soulless and i hate it 1 year ago:
Well, for context, Mastodon has around 1.5 million monthly active users. Twitter/Reddit are around 450 million monthly active users. You can enjoy Lemmy’s small size but also see that at 60k monthly active users it hasn’t even reached a size comparable to many other famous small sized forums. I don’t know what N is. I personally think the Fediverse should be the replacement for corporate social media and that social media can be essential in how information spreads through society. It can decide elections. It can shift society’s views on issues. I think it does us a disservice to go the hipster route and cling to our small niche thing and resist growth. The beauty of Lemmy is that there will always be small communities regardless. Anyone who wants a small community need only defederate from the big servers and stick to a small, niche server.
- Comment on The internet has become soulless and i hate it 1 year ago:
I think we’re all a bit disillusioned with it now. I feel like on the 2000’s era internet we all were showing up bright eyed and optimistic about the possibilities. We lived in a world without the internet and having it felt like a superpower. But in the 2010’s and especially around 2016, the misinformation pump got turned on hard and we saw the internet bring some truly sinister real world events to fruition. SEO started getting used more and more through the 2010’s. Social media companies started finding nasty ways to profit off of us by being more selective in what we see. And now this has been the year of enshittification with big companies finally making moves that actively worsen our experiences in order to cash in on a lot of investment money that never turned into anything real. Basically I think what happened is a mixture of people becoming more cynical and the internet becoming over-automated and now this year businesses finally realizing that potential profit is worthless without acting on it.
With all that said though, the Fediverse feels like our chance to finally fight back. Lemmy still only has around 60k monthly active users. We need to try to bring that number up.
- Comment on Flag of Canada but it’s approaching you 1 year ago:
Does this mean that Canada is always expanding?