I think that’s the sign of a good person

If you build a world for good persons, it’ll collapse in your lifetime.

Good persons want to understand each other. People don’t - they want to think as little as possible above all else

There are levels to programming.

It’s fun to solve simple problems effortlessly. It’s fun to solve hard problems after banging your head against the wall for a week

Simple problems that require a lot of code are not fun. Neither are medium problems that require a lot of code. Herd problems that require a lot of code fill me with joy.

Programming is like an abusive relationship. Mostly days it just hurts you. But when it’s good it’s great… It doesn’t just give you the satisfaction of a job well done, it expands you mind

Also, every other week we get another reason to make it a priority

The arguments against it boil down to “it’s different and scary/I don’t understand it”, “there’s compatibility issues that might be complicated to fix”, or “well what we have now is good enough for my needs”

I don’t disagree with that position… As a next step, it seems pretty sensible to me

To truly understand where you stand, you have to break false dichotomy - political platforms aren’t one or two dimensional, they’re multifaceted. IMO you have to pick an end goal, and chart a course towards it

Personally, my end goal is solar punk. I want to live in a green world with technology. To get there, I full throatedly resist authoritarianism or centralization of any kind- I believe the larger it is, the more it’ll attract sociopaths seeking power for powers sake

Eco socialism is a step in my desired direction - I have no issue with it. It’s a sensible waypoint and I’d gladly join hands with those who see it as the end goal. But I’d encourage you to chat with gpt (or better yet, local AI) in the context of your end goal and the next step to get there - LLMs are an extension of the user, and I think this is a proper use of the technology

That’s what makes you a leftist. Noticing we waste 1/3 of food and less than 1/5 are starving, and thinking “clearly there has to be a better way, let’s figure it out” is what separates leftists from liberals

Recently, a bunch of people on tik tok found this “bug” in their banking app where you can write a bad check, then withdraw the funds before it clears… Then started crying about it when their balances updated

Dude definitely thought he discovered a cool new life hack

It’s actually “Tesla real”, learn to speak Spanish you uncultured swine

Printing for a single city has got to be more than hosting for an entire country

Think of all the people you need to print everything out before the next morning - you need a big enough staff of editors and reporters that you can get everything ready in a short time frame, you need the staff to handle the printing overnight, you need drivers to deliver within a 3-ish hour period and the staff to coordinate and load them up

Meanwhile, for a website, a team of 5 developers/devops could handle all of it. You still need journalists and editors, but they are no longer on the same time frame - they can just release things as they’re ready, and maybe curate an email for the day and what appears on the homepage.

As far as paper and print costs vs hosting costs? If each paper cost 1 cent, were talking like between .01 cent and .0001 cent per page view, maybe even a tenth or hundredth of that. It adds up quickly, but compared to paper and ink?

I too appreciate when entities take the mask off

Women are causing the same as a little bit of a lot of people

Would you give a few hundred dollars and couple dozen hours of learning? Because this is a very achievable goal

I have this recurring thought that this world is like a training program. Like it’s to show what happens when you think “let’s organize people into hierarchies” or “this is what results from your ideas playing out”

Agreed, but I think it’s more than that

I don’t think he’s offering them plane tickets. That means they have enough wealth to move there - it would instantly be a shot in the arm for the Russian economy. They’d get a captive market, and he’s not even inviting them to be Russian

That selector also means they’re more likely to have useful skills, and the messaging is targeting people very susceptible to Russia style propaganda - he could censor their connection to the outside world, and they’d thank him for it

Also, if NATO arms hit American civilians, that would be a powerful message to reduce international support for Ukraine or NATO.

They’re too valuable. They’d pay off for him immediately, and long term he’d have an isolated community that is just begging to chug the Kool aid

It just makes too much sense… The only way to get past electron is a better electron. Or just fix electron

We’ve been going after this concept for decades now. That’s what java swing was supposed to be, what python gtlk was supposed to be, and I’m sure there were others before that and there’s been a hell of a lot since then

It’s all trade-offs between flexibility, ease of use, and performance. Also between maintenance cost, portability, and existing library support

Electron is a good compromise. The execution could be better, but it’s come a long way. There is no one size fits all solution, but there are some decent options that handle that compromise differently

I’m split, but I lean slightly towards no. On one hand, it could be good for discoverability, and it would help my efforts to make a client-side algorithm

On the other hand, it will make one of Lemmy’s problems worse - engagement. Some people will vote less, and it’s already feeling a little quieter around here as the numbers settled after the Reddit Exodus. I doubt it’ll be a massive change, but a .5% decrease in voting, permanently, could make a difference

Ultimately, you can see it on federated platforms, so shrug

So this isn’t a compelling argument because it sounds outlandish and the implications (while serious) are indirect

Every major power, and some companies, have population simulations. It’s not that hard to build one - we’ve been using them for decades, and they start yielding useful results even when they’re pretty simple. Individuals are complex, but populations can be boiled down with statistics pretty easily

Let’s say I want to increase stochastic violence in America. I rate the traits of as many people as I can across as many useful criteria as I can measure. I could then tweak an algorithm to show something I think would radicalize people to a test group, and measure again. I then take what I learned, and polish my approach until I’m ready to go live

You can do this to whatever end you like - and browsing habits can only tell a human so much, but this is what big data does. It finds associations humans wouldn’t see through math

This probably sounds like I’m wearing a tin foil hat, but this is a real thing. This is how foreign election interference works - astroturfing blindly only does so much, and modeling a population isn’t difficult (depending on what you’re trying to do)

Now as for browsing habits - like location data or Facebook friends, with enough data points you can find out things about a person they don’t know themselves. It may or may not make sense to a human, but big data is all about finding associations through blind math.

If you provide a set of data points, you contribute. It may or may not influence you, but either way it improves the ability to influence those around you.

I don’t know how much opera collects, I don’t know how much of that data is exfiltrated to China. I know I don’t want anyone to have too much of that data, but I also have to live my life.

It’s a matter of harm reduction - educate yourself on your choices, listen to people who dive deeper than you’re willing to, and do what you can to make the most ethical choice based on where you are right now. There’s no perfect choice

You guys are circling around the answer

Aero looks, better menus (I refuse to believe nested drop downs are peak layout, but ribbon stuff looks pretty, at the cost of useful organization)

And finally, make it look good in dark mode. We aren’t a print-first culture anymore, and I prefer my retinas intact

That’s not even the problem here… AI, big data, a consultant - it’s all just an excuse to point to when they do what they wanted to do anyways, profile “criminals” and harass them

Embracing lack of meaning is nihilism talk!

Take in existence as it comes and laugh at the absurdity of it all

It depends on how it’s implemented - if it’s just enough to patch the system for a while, it’ll just become a way to squeeze more out of people

If it’s enough that work becomes optional, it’ll lessen the pressure enough that consumption will drop. More people will grow food, cook, and DIY everything from repairs to cottage handicrafts. They’ll have the time and energy to organize, politically and otherwise

Regardless, UBI is a stopgap measure - it can just extend the game of capitalism a little longer, or it can be the start of a transition