The title of this piece is clickbait as all hell, but I viewed it as more of an anti-Google piece rather than an anti-AI piece. Like, I do think AI has some merits, but those are massively outweighed by the nefarious Silicon Valley ghouls(like Google) abusing it to make all of our lives worse.

But I think this begs the question of whether search was any good before. It wasn’t. It isn’t.

Yeah, I agree. Google had such a stranglehold on search for so long that they could make their product worse and not lose any meaningful marketshare. They knew damn well that people weren’t going to switch to Bing or anything, so they could enshittify the hell out of search to wring as much profit out of it as possible.

I’m really hopeful that federation continues to grow and bandwidth and storage costs can allow a simple hobbyist to maintain a site/node for minimal cost while contributing to the greater ecosystem. Smaller communities where reputation actually matters instead of being gamified into upvotes and downvotes as some sort of facsimile of trustworthiness or quality. I think with a more personal internet, AI becomes less of a threat anyway.

Absolutely. We’ve got to start cutting back on our use of corpo-internet, if possible. Especially considering that many of these companies are either collaborating with a fascist government or are enthusiastically supporting and influencing said fascist government.

this isn’t just dropping fact-checking. per the article:

Beyond the end of the facet-checking program, Zuckerberg said the company will be eliminating some content policies around hot-button issues including immigration and gender, and refocus the company’s automated moderation systems on what he called “high severity violations” and rely on users to report other violations.

Facebook will also be moving its trust and safety and content moderation team from California to Texas.

This is full bore capitulation to fascism, as capital will always do. soon, zuckerberg’s social media sites will be indistinguishable from musk’s x. everybody needs to defederate from threads if they haven’t already.

Yep, the moment you have to explain it, you’ve already lost; the normies will check out. That’s the thing, these sites depend on having a huge userbase and people just aren’t going to go to a site with “nobody on it”. I maintain an account on both Mastodon and Bluesky… they’re both pretty neat in their own way. But Mastodon isn’t ever going to be the virtual town square. I kinda like it quiet there, tbh.

This is why I never really understand when people go “Just use Linux!!”. It isn’t a feasible option for everyone. For me, I work full time and I don’t have the energy to constantly fix things if they break. When I switched to Linux, I took great pains to ensure that my computer use case is one that could work in Linux, built a computer with parts known to be fine in Linux(including an AMD graphics card) and run Debian Stable on because I wanted something that wouldn’t be constantly updating. I’m in a comfy situation now, but I did a lot of planning beforehand that you can’t really expect people to do. Like, it’s great if we get more people using Linux, but that’s not a trivial ask.

Yikes. Well, at least we have something easy to point to when we’re asked why we’re defederated from lemmy.world.

If something’s going to try to grab my attention, it had better be worth my while. I block as many notifications as I can, both on my phone and my computer. I also try to avoid using apps for things unless I have to.

As nice as it would be to see people ditch Threads for the Fediverse, I suspect the number of people who will actually do that would be infinitesimally small. The power of inertia is very, very strong.

I’ll never use a Meta/Facebook product if I can help it. They’re pure evil.

This isn’t surprising in the least. They’ve been pushing more and more ads recently; trying to get streamers to run them more often. I hate ads, so I have always opted for a short pre-roll so that when its done, viewers won’t have to worry about ads anymore. But I think Twitch will eventually force streamers to run ads every half hour, no matter how many people they scare off.

It’s alright, just basically Twitter 2. It’s useful for some things. A lot of creatives chose to migrate there, which is nice so that I can network with fellow Twitch streamers and keep up with news on the platform. As much as I like Mastodon, I just wasn’t getting that there. It’s also nice that a bunch of artists I used to follow are there.

Yeah, I think I’ll pass. The Raspberry Pi people hired a former police officer who used their stuff in hidden surveillance. Then when people called them out on it on Twitter, Pi blocked those who did. https://petapixel.com/2022/12/09/raspberry-pi-under-fire-by-creators-who-are-upset-it-hired-a-former-cop/

Honestly, that article is pretty lousy. It just boils down to “I oppose gay marriage because I don’t like the concept of marriage”. Just seems like veiled homophobia to specifically call out opposition to gay marriage when they could have just written “I oppose the concept of marriage, and this is why”.

Even I could have told you that a vague digital “proof of ownership” of a hideous, mass-produced ape image was a bad investment.

Sorry! I didn’t realize it was paywalled because I could see the whole thing. Hopefully this should work:

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mercurynews.com%2F2023%2F07%2F24%2Fbuilt-in-software-death-dates-are-sending-thousands-of-schools-chromebooks-to-the-recycling-bin%2F

That’s what they should be doing, but it isn’t what they’re going to do, unfortunately.

Kimathi Bradford, a 16-year-old Oakland tech repair intern, has looked into whether there was a way to replace the outdated Chromebook software with a non-Google brand, but it ended up being a lot of work, Kimathi said, and the open-source replacement wasn’t up to par. “It’s like the Fritos of software,” he said. “No one really wants to use it.”

Now, I’m not sure if what they tried was Linux, but I wouldn’t be too surprised. The younger generations grew up with smartphones; I feel as though operating systems will become more streamlined and opaque as time goes on. I suspect we’ll have to contend with the phonification of mainstream computing in the coming years.

I don’t mind Calibri, but Aptos does look like an improvement. I particularly like the serif added to the lowercase L… it has always annoyed me how that and uppercase I look exactly the same in many fonts. It’s one of the reasons why I’m partial to fonts with serifs.

That just leads to a toxic community. No thanks. Also the “Hate speech does not exist” thing is certainly a take.

This is utterly insane. Twitter has basically become pay-to-use. I give it less than a day for him to walk this back.

Yeah, I absolutely can’t imagine being a writer who is trying to break in this space. Discoverability is going to be a nightmare going forward.

I have since deactivated my account, but i still will occasionally click on the Twitter link on desktop. That site loads sooooooo slow these days. It’s really disheartening to see so many people refuse to let go of birdsite.