I have a literal HDD in a pelican case.

I plug it into my NAS periodically, clone over to it, scrub for bit rot, put it back in the case and drop it at my BILs.

Plenty good enough.

It’s so confused about me because my whole household uses one Amazon account.

Honestly, it’s kind of a wild claim to be seen in 2026, when, nearly over a decade ago, Facebook was abusing this exact thing and optimizing their social media algorithms specifically to manipulate and divide people because it increased engagement.

And here we are, seemingly having forgotten the past, which is barely even history at this point, and are finding ourselves surprised that the exact thing that was being built has the exact effect that it was being built to create.

Even more astonishing is the number of people in this comment section either arguing against that or refuting it.

Don’t worry, I’m sure AI is going to make that all better, right? Right?

It’s literally one of the things that gives lobbies and billionaires the level of control that they have.

Why do you think they managed to keep growing and maintaining control? It’s because everyone else is going at each other’s throats over artificially created cultural issues in an ever-ongoing culture war, largely fueled by these people and spread and scaled over social media.

Social media is literally the weapon they use, and almost no one has any idea of the level of manipulation they are subject to through their feeds.

Corporate social media has had one goal, and it’s had that goal since the 2010s, which is to increase engagement and increase numbers.

This was revealed quite plainly all the way back in, I think, 2013, when it was revealed that Facebook was doing experiments and found that hateful speech, disagreements, slander, and all this stuff increased engagement. Getting people to go at each other’s throats increased engagement more than bringing people together into communities, and as such, Facebook started to optimize for this.

More than 13 years ago.

That started a societal tonal shift in societies affected by Facebook and future social media companies that followed the same pattern.

And look where we are today: no one can get along anywhere. Everyone’s afraid of everyone. We have increasingly unstable social structures that are imploding in themselves, while the rich and powerful keep asserting control while the peons go for each other’s throats over the scraps.

It’s not just the speed of communication, it’s the scale of communication. Someone can light up thousands of bot accounts to push a particular message in minutes and reach millions of people in the next hour, subtly manipulating them based on mass amounts of data available to individually target people vulnerable to your specific campaign

Whereas in the days of newspapers, you had to get it in the newspaper. You had to get it printed, and that newspaper would only reach so many people in so much time due to the literal physical limitations of time and distance. Many of the people that would be reached may not be interested in or vulnerable to what you are trying to state.

The newspaper equivalent of today is a newspaper that is made as a special case for each person it’s being delivered to, specifically tailored to take advantage of their political leanings, their fears, their ignorance, and so on and so forth.

Rumors have been spreading for a millennium, and democracy has been okay in the sense that democracy has only been a thing relatively recently. Social media didn’t exist 1,000 years ago as a means to spread rumors at scale to hundreds of millions of people.

Something that was said decades ago is that every village used to have an idiot. Now every idiot has a village.

And even more so now, the efforts of one person to sway public opinion can push lies to hundreds of millions of people, which is something that has been impossible up till now.

That’s the point. Rumors are, in many ways, more dangerous than lies, since they mix in with the truth in ways that make them more believable.

What about anything you said refutes the point?

Not arguing your point, but a few hundred thousand…?

If you’re going to be making an argument, at least get the most basic of your facts right.

Globally there are about 40-50 million software engineers. A hell of a lot more than a few hundred thousand. 1/10th of that is in the U.S.

It was removed from /c/technology because /c/technology isn’t for discussing, learning about, or posting about technology. It’s for posting about big tech companies, tech adjacent or non-tech news, politics, and their CEOs.

It’s the Lemmy equivalent of reddits. It’s pretty much a pile of crap.

If it’s adding that many lines, it’s not refactoring. It’s just adding slop.

Yeah, but that’s not Czech written there…?

… What?

I’m incredibly productive, and have had the joy of working on productive teams. And unless they are working with hundreds of full time, high performing, engineers. You ain’t changing 10 million lines in a month.

With AI, it’s technically possible, but I can only imagine the slop. It’s likely incomprehensible at this point.

AI in engineering is an accelerator. If you are producing slop software, which most teams are, then it’s just going to accelerate the rate at which you can produce shitty software and bad code.

If teams are producing high-quality software, then it accelerates those teams’ ability to deliver that quality.

It’s because the average quality of code that they are trained on is like that. Most code that is written by humans is slop, and the models represent that.

Producing overly complicated solutions to uncomplicated problems

What you see there is not tempered glass. That is laminated glass. This is clearly evident in the video.

Are those laminated side windows?

Oof.

I guess in a situation where you need to break your side window to get out, you’re just fucked then, huh?

To be fair, most of Lemmy isn’t either. Same dog piling and emotional based crowd behavior here as there is there. If you want to speak critically about something not well aligned to the viewpoint and opinions of others here you get shot down and shit on the same, if not worse, than on reddit (echo chamber effect seems stronger here).

I’d say the ratio is about the same, it is the Internet after all.

Difference being that reddit also has platform abuse and manipulation that Lemmy doesn’t.