Schadrach

People at the heads of nonprofits are often highly compensated, and it’s rare that any of them solve the underlying problem or even make meaningful headway. It’s why there is so much “awareness” and short term band aids involved. A nonprofit that solves the problem it’s supposedly trying to solve has no reason to exist and will cost people well paying jobs managing it.

There’s no algorithm to be played in the fediverse.

There presumably is. Some metric decides visibility on the feeds. That algorithm not being based on corporate profitability doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Basically they figured out a way to train AI to recognize Reddit threads going viral and/or predict which ones will, among those which ones will also rate highly in Google results and which will tend to be used as sources by the biggest LLMs and to post in those threads about your whatever you want to generate attention for. So overcomplicated way of automating advertising. Optimized posting to convince LLMs to talk about whatever you want to advertise.

I’ve always said that SEO was always going to happen, Google is at fault for the search optimized and the best result for what the user is asking for not being the same result. We’re now going to start seeing either LLMs sell whatever this tactic gets used on or essentially a sort of adblock being built into LLM training and search APIs to keep it from working, to make LLMs less likely to fall for native advertising/astroturfing.

You may have nothing to fear right now, but you never know who’s going to be in office soon.

The way I always explain it to people - take any additional government power or access to information you either don’t care about or actively support. Now imagine whoever you oppose/hate the most taking office and trying to use that against your interests. Are you still OK with them having that power? Same principle applies regardless of what power or who’s pushing for it.

It’s like due process - you don’t want any category of alleged violation not to be subject to due process, and if you don’t understand why then it’s time to wrongfully accuse you of doing that so you understand the problem.

If a theory and every attempt at real world application of a theory yield wildly different results, shouldn’t that suggest something in the theory is deeply flawed?

Really it’s actually capitalism that supposes people are too dumb to make their own choices or know how a business is run, and thus shouldn’t have say over company choices.

Really it’s actually that businesses with that structure tend to perform better in a market economy, because no one forces businesses to be started as “dictatorships run by bosses that effectively have unilateral control over all choices of the company” other than the people starting that business themselves. You can literally start a business organized as a co-op (which by your definitions is fundamentally a socialist or communist entity) - there’s nothing preventing that from being the organizing structure. The complaint instead tends to be that no one is forcing existing successful businesses to change their structure and that a new co-op has to compete in a market where non-co-op businesses also operate.

If co-ops were a generally more effective model, you’d expect them to be more numerous and more influential. And they do alright for themselves in some spaces. For example in the US many of the biggest co-ops are agricultural.

Blocklist is literally empty.

They federate with everyone, including the insufferable right wingers, the insufferable tankies, and the people who draw loli (I think there’s only one lemmy instance still active that allows loli and it’s the radqueer one, and it’s tiny enough you don’t notice it unless you go looking for it). Most of the insufferable right wingers have also closed their respective instances.

If their mastodon instance is any comparison, it still federate with everyone including the instances that post loli. I suspect if an instance were posting stuff illegal in the US that would be grounds for SDF to defederate for legal reasons, but 1A protections are broader than speech protections in most of the rest of the world.

You can always block the community or even the entire instance of anyone you don’t want to see.

Or one with the broadest possible federation like lemmy.sdf.org, though they are US based if that’s a problem for you.

SDF does not defederate. The blocklist is empty. And it’s small enough and chill enough that it’s unlikely to get blocked by other instances much.

They’re a non-profit that’s older than the web and offers a variety of network and retrocomputing services including most famously a public access Unix server. They started as a dialup anime BBS.

I’ve never had that problem. Not on my instance’s web page or using Sync on my phone.

…it would be if in your analogy GMail blocks Yahoo because they don’t like the politics of their CEO, Outlook blocks both GMail and Yahoo to create a safe space, and you left Protonmail out of the list entirely because almost everyone else is blocking them for not banning users who email the wrong kind of porn to each other.

It’s not a big deal until you realize the notion that they all talk to each other is mostly a lie and all the big ones block dozens of instances each. Hell, the threads on the larger instances about whether or not Threads and Truth Social should be defederated if they ever enable federation were some of the highest activity topics on Lemmy for a bit. So was people cheering about Burggit shutting down their lemmy server.

My parents told me that I’d understand how the world works when I get older, but I just hate it more and more.

That’s how you know you’re understanding it.

I mean it sounds like it could be video from the charging facility

I mean that’s what I assumed. I can’t imagine a reason one would want a camera watching you charge - like that’s an expense for little if any benefit. And if it was charged at a charging station owned by Tesla, I would be shocked if there wasn’t camera footage or if Tesla didn’t have access to it.

but what the actual fuck they can unlock your car.

I would imagine any car with keyless entry can be unlocked by the manufacturer if they have your VIN. They build the system and pair the keyfobs and locks, they’re bound to have that ability in case something happens to your keys.

Only insofar as some instances block communication from some other instances. Not mine though, that’s actually one of the reasons I picked it. That and it being by an org that’s older than the web and runs a public unix server and a bunch of retrocomputing type services as well as fediverse stuff. They started out as a dialup anime BBS.

You do know there’s a big difference between a “default” option and a “mandatory” setting, right? Specifically that you do, in fact, have a choice to change a default?

Not forcing the user to proactively make a choice is not the same thing as denying the user the ability to choose.

Search engines other than Google seem to be able to index reddit just fine though. I thought the Reddit deal was about API access to make for easier AI training data, also I hadn’t seen anything saying that such a deal would be exclusive to Google.

Who do they have an exclusive deal with? Are there sites you can currently only search on Google? Or browsers or similar that require you to use Google?

The problem is, if one company dominates search, you have no way to evaluate whether they are doing it well.

You could just go to other search engines and run the same queries and compare results.

For example, I did a search on 6 different search engines earlier today looking for a specific Reddit thread related to an update to a certain Skyrim mod without quite naming the mod (because I couldn’t remember the exact name of the mod, and was hoping to find the Reddit thread to get the mod name or Nexus link). All 6 had the Nexus page for the mod itself within the top 3 results, and all of them but Google and Yandex had the Reddit thread in question on the first page.

Google can be REQUIRED to give users A CHOICE of Search Engines.

Don’t they, err, already do this?

I mean a search engine is literally just a website and absolutely nothing prevents you from just going to duckduckgo.com or bing.com or wherever. Don’t think Chrome prevents you from accessing other search engines in general, and last time I used it (admittedly a while back) it had a setting to change the search engine used by default if you just typed something into the address bar.

There’s an argument to make that digital data is by default a post-scarcity sort of thing and that in a post-scarcity environment communism is the only reasonable system. But we don’t operate in a post scarcity environment for physical goods and services, and there’s really not anything we can point to historically that suggests a communist takeover doesn’t do terrible things to availability, quality and variety of food available.

I once tried to install Linux around then, not long after ISA cards with Plug n Play became a thing.

Linux: So now to even pretend to get the card to work you have to download and run a tool to generate a config file to feed to another tool so you can then install the driver and get basic functionality from the card (which is all that’s available on Linux). Except the first tool doesn’t generate a working config file - it generates a file containing every possible configuration your hardware supports hypothetically having and requires you to find and uncomment the one you want to actually use. Requiring you to manually configure the card and thus kinda defeating the point of Plug n Play (though I guess that configuration was in software, not by setting jumpers).

Same card in Windows at the time: Install card, boot Windows. Card is automatically identified and given a valid configuration, built in drivers provide basic functionality. Can download software from manufacturer for more advanced functionality.

That soured me on Linux for a long time. Might try it again sometime soon just to see what it’s like if nothing else. ProtonDB doesn’t have the most positive things to say about my Steam collection, and I imagine odds are worse for stuff not available on Steam.