• 17 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Do you never research a product before purchasing or do you just work with whatever is available in your local store? If you’re buying a car, is it just whatever is on the side of the road or do you search for expert reviews or reliability data?

    I, for one, actively search out the reviews from entities that go out of their way to not be sponsored by the makers of the products they’re reviewing.


  • I’ve just had an epiphany (or maybe a half-baked showerthought) reading this thread.

    All marketers are trying to sell people stuff, but if you think about it, what’s the one thing in common that they’re all trying to sell, and that they’re presumably best at?

    Their own services.

    So who knows if this “advertising value” has any relationship with reality, or if it’s just inflated bullshit marketers make up to sell themselves.







  • That’s how federation works with[out] requiring a direct connection from every instance to every other instance. My instance can connect to yours to get your content, but also the content from all other instances that you federate with. And vice-versa.

    So what? That’s like saying ISPs should require Section 230 to avoid liability because they route packets. We’re talking about legality: it’s stuff like intent and responsibility that matters, not the technical details. Each instance owner still gets to decide which other instances they want to federate with; some ‘middle hop’ in that connection is irrelevant.

    The fundamental issue that Section 230 is designed to address is the separation between the users posting the content and the platform owners who control who sees it, and the moral hazard that creates. If you eliminate the separation, there’s nowhere left for the moral hazard to exist.


  • I’m usually a big fan of the EFF, but it’s wrong on this one. If you decentralize to the limit – i.e., such that each user is running their own instance for themselves – it becomes okay for the service to become liable for the user’s speech because the user and the service owner are one in the same. In reality, (extremely) federated social media is the only kind that can survive without Section 230 and thus repealing it entirely would be a win for the Fediverse.

    (You could argue “but users won’t go to the trouble of running their own instance,” but to that I’d say “they will if the law doesn’t give them any other choice, short of not participating at all.”)





  • That alone upends centuries of American foreign policy, and sets a precedent that paves the way for a return to mercantilism.

    One thing I’ve gotta hand to the Trump regime, the shit they’re pulling is getting (at least some) people to learn all sorts of stuff about history and civics that they never had to care about before.

    I’m betting the 3rd Amendment is gonna become relevant again any day now, if nothing else, just so Stephen Miller can finish filling out his Bill of Rights violation bingo card.





  • How many Ubuntu users (who are usually novice in Linux)

    Don’t be so sure of that. I used to use Gentoo 20 years ago. I use Kubuntu today. Why? Because I don’t care anymore and just want something that works with minimal effort.

    The last time I reinstalled my OS, about a year ago, it was because I replaced the SSD. The time before that was seven(?) years earlier, when I built the system in the first place.

    Snaps mildly annoy me though, so I might change. Eventually, after probably several more years.

    I bet there are more people like me (long-time users picking boring, “basic” distros) than you think. We just aren’t usually very conspicuous compared to the “I use Arch BTW” crowd who are new enough that they still feel the need to make distro choice part of their identity.