davehtaylor

davehtaylor , 18 hours ago

Because federation is a mess, and doesn't really solve the problem. There's no quick elevator pitch that non-technical people can understand, on-boarding is painful, and even if you as the publisher understand it, your audience may not.

davehtaylor , 11 days ago

You mean to tell me that the purpose-built disinformation machine that you developed has been used by malicious actors to spread disinformation?!

davehtaylor , 11 days ago

Exactly.

Gods this whole "if we outlaw AI only outlaws will have AI" bullshit is so so tiresome and naive

davehtaylor , 13 days ago

Yes, that's exactly what I expect. If you can't verify with 100% certainty that your supply chain isn't using slave labor, then you stop using that supply chain. And if that costs the company an entire market, or even causes the company to fail, then so be it.

davehtaylor , 12 days ago

Yeah I think I agree. The law should be: if you can’t positively confirm it’s clean, you can’t use it.

We should have standards for the treatment of people, and strive not to participate in or reward those who treat people in unacceptable ways.

Totally agree.

It’s not good for a country to create an unfair marketplace. And it is an unfair marketplace when rules which acutely affect only certain people drastically for the good of all, are implemented too quickly to adapt to without major setbacks.

Just saying it should be phased in, to minimize local economic tearing.

Totally disagree.

Fines/tariffs/etc. are just cost of doing business for big business. Slowly enforcing regulation gives companies time to hedge, shuffle, and deflect without actually doing anything. Consequences should be hard and fast. Economies be damned. If an economy can't stand on its own without companies acting ethically, or with them being punished for it, then it shouldn't stand at all.

davehtaylor , 12 days ago

Wait. We're talking about making sure a company isn't using slave labor in their supply chain, and creating consequences for them doing so. And that's a problem for you? You think it's fucked up that a company forced to abide by rules preventing them from using slave labor?

davehtaylor , 12 days ago

WTF are you talking about, "trapping" you?

If you can't give a full-throated condemnation of a company using slave labor, then I don't know what your position is supposed to be.

davehtaylor , 20 days ago

Not really a fan of republicanism. I don't like the idea that the people we elect can just ignore their constituents, or that those people can then make appointments that are not something the general public want. I do however like the idea of a unicameral legislature. I think our bicameral legislature creates more problems than it solves. On top of the Senate being wildly unequal in its representation.

We need a strict representative democracy, where representatives are legally beholden to act according to the wishes of their constituents. And we need to reform or eliminate positions where unelected persons are appointed without any input from the public. For example, SCOTUS needs to be expanded, given term limits, and the justices need to stand for public election, not appointment by whichever president is in power at the time. Currently, SCOTUS can be entirely stacked and controlled by a given administration, nullifying any semblance of checks and balances, giving functional control of the government to that president long after their term has ended. Further, SCOTUS can simply act of their own will, with literally no recourse for anyone to stop them. Same reforms should apply to all court appointments (federal/circuit/district/etc.)

• Abolish the Senate
• Abolish the electoral college
• Establish ranked choice voting
• Term limits top to bottom

Of course, part of this would take constitutional amendment(s), which given our political climate, is functionally impossible, on top of legislation that no one in power would ever be willing to put forward nor support. The people in power aren't going to willingly surrender any of that power. So I don't really know how we fix it.

davehtaylor , 1 month ago

"We need to return to a time when women had no agency, no real personhood, were essentially slaves in their homes, treated as property, and bore literally all the work of the home and family."

...

"Wow, this is oppressive."

These people have no thought that the situation women were in 50+ years ago was forced. They didn't have a choice. They couldn't even open a bank account on their own. But want to paint that time as some sort of heyday that we need to return to.

Further, I'm convinced that the tradwife movement isn't in any way genuine, that it's entirely white supremacist, patriarchal propaganda. Maybe there's a handful out there that genuinely want this. But otherwise I think it's entirely a pushback against modernity, and bigots and white cishet men trying to claw back their cultural hegemony.

davehtaylor , 1 month ago

I can certainly see why there would be appeal but you need to be very cautious of who you want to be a tradwife to. You create a lot of dependence on your partner, You sacrifice a lot of power, and once you start doing this it becomes increasingly difficult taking it back.

Hear hear.

I've seen so many older couples where the woman was 100% dependent on the man. He never allowed her to manage finances, have access to the bank accounts, pay bills, etc. and then after 30-40 years he leaves or dies, and then she's left without any life experience whatsoever and has no idea how to manage her own life.

Or, he's abusive, shitty, and terrible, but since she has no agency of her own or any idea of how to have that agency, she's trapped and can't even conceive of the idea of leaving him.

It's a horrifying experience.

davehtaylor , 29 days ago

Exactly.

"I want a woman who is submissive, and respects 'traditional' gender roles"

No, you want a servant you can fuck, and then get violent with if she ever refuses to comply.

These people don't want partners or relationships. They want power fantasies.

davehtaylor , 1 month ago

“We want to protect our cattle and our ranches,” said Arizona representative Michael Carbone. Speaking at the Hardee County Cattleman’s Arena, DeSantis said that cultivated meat would “wipe the people sitting here out of business,” and that “we will not let that happen,”

Funny* how these chuds all about the "free market" unless their products can't compete, and they have to have subsidies and monopolies to protect their profits.

davehtaylor , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

And that's the problem. The average person isn't looking for it, and will absolutely not see it. As long as it's good enough, that's all that matters. A plausible enough video of Joe Biden talking about rounding up Christians into internment camps that gets shared on Facebook, or something like that which panders to right-wing bigotry, is enough to get people going. Even real images and videos that are miscaptioned are enough, and even when a link is there that disproves the caption.

People seriously underestimate just how horrifying the possibilities are with this shit. And as high stakes as this election cycle is, and the state of politics in this country, the tendency for people to latch on to anything that affirms their preexisting ideals creates a fucking minefield

davehtaylor , 1 month ago

So we shouldn't do anything about it, and just let big corps scoop up all the data they want, regardless of ownership?

davehtaylor , 1 month ago

1. The largest code contributors to Linux are corporate contributions
2. Regular people who contribute to OSS do so as a passion project, as a hobby, and have other unrelated jobs that pay the bills. Those people still have to make a living, they're just not doing it from their software contributions. Journalism isn't a hobby and you can't work a day job and still be an effective journalist. News orgs don't come together as hobby projects.

I'm not defending advertising. I hate it and think it's ruined the web. I'm just addressing the analogy here wrt Linux.

davehtaylor , 1 month ago

Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon all need to be broken up into a thousand different companies, same as we did with AT&T.

And unlike with AT&T, after divestiture there needs to be an order in place that perpetually prevents the divested companies from ever merging or buying each other up. At this point AT&T has almost completely re-formed from the companies it was broken into, and that should never have been allowed.

And for fucks sake we need to make the fine for white collar crime that extends state lines to necessitate the forfeiture of the entire C-suite’s and board of directors assets, both domestically and internationally, upon threat of seal team 6. Empty their bank accounts and leave them with nothing

Absolutely this. We need to abolish corporate personhood, and hold company leadership directly responsible for the company's behavior. Since it is the people who are doing these things. The "company" isn't some autonomous entity that has a will of its own. People drive it, and those people should be held accountable.

davehtaylor , 1 month ago

Am I misunderstanding, or is ActivityPub just reinventing RSS?

davehtaylor , 1 month ago

SEO disgusts me

Gods yes. It basically steamrolls everything and you end up with two situations: people who knowingly game the algorithm for malicious intent and pollute search engines and media platforms, or you have people who are earnestly playing to the algorithm to help their "content" get noticed because that's the only way it will get noticed. It creates this homogeneous landscape where everything looks the same, everyone's doing and posting the same things, everyone is chasing trends and virality, and no one is doing anything interesting or creative anymore because novel ideas that aren't SEO'd to death don't get noticed.

So what we end up with is our current situation: a toxic landscape of "influencers", "content creators", content farms, ad farms, bots, etc. polluting everything, and people with genuine passion and interesting ideas getting buried under a sea of engagement bait, rage-bait, and disguised ads.

davehtaylor , 1 month ago

while websites just repeating the search phrase over and over with no answer in sight are at the top

A decade or so ago, this was a really bad problem, especially with sites like Experts Exchange et al. Content farms just grabbing your query and puking back to you. Or, sites that would take a thread on one forum, and then replicate it across 10 other sites as though they're different forums, but it's the exact same posts. But it's gotten so, so, so much worse in the last year or so. Google searches these days are like wading through a septic tank trying to find a microgram of gold.

davehtaylor , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Can the United States apply consistent standards to pro-Palestine protesters as it does to protecting speech in favor of our country’s violence? No, it doesn’t seem like we can.

2020 made that loud and clear. The people in power got fucking terrified at the idea that people might be reaching a critical mass of actually making substantive changes, and they violently and rapidly cracked down on it. They're not going to let that happen again. Our government and our institutions since then have proven time and time again that they will burn this country to the ground before the will of the people is heard or respected.

davehtaylor , 1 month ago

I absolutely agree we need this. But the problem stated in the article

The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.

is the crux of it all, and without violence or extreme governmental measures forcibly breaking up big tech companies, the banning of selling personal data, etc. (all of which would also require violence because our government absolutely will not do these things) this simply isn't going to be fixed. Politely asking billionaires to give up their captive revenue streams, and the power they wield with their platforms, will never produce results. And "well, what if we all just delete Instagram/Facebook/et al?" isn't an answer either. "Content creators" are tied to these platforms for their own revenue streams and livelihoods, and they're not going to give that up either. And for the most part, a large part of the population simply does not care enough.

The rise of smartphones in the late 2000's really heralded the beginning of this downfall. There are walled gardens to be found all up and down the pipeline: the phone OEM, the OS devs, the apps and their platforms, the app stores, the service providers, etc. And you now have a device in your pocket that has always on internet connection either through wifi or cellular, a GPS radio, accelerometers, cameras, microphones, NFC, bluetooth, and all of these way to track literally everything about your life: everywhere you go, every app you use, every website you visit, listen to everything you say, and watch everything you do. And because it's all so convenient, we willingly allowed ourselves to accept this unprecedented level of invasiveness and control.

The people who have that kind of power will not give it up willingly. And our government is too invested and has its fingers too far into all of it to do anything about it. I truly do not believe we'll see something come along the way FB killed MySpace. Nothing is going to do that to Meta now. They're too big and have too much power. There's no market solution. There's no regulatory will.

Nothing short of violence would ever be able to fix this. And I don't see any kind of critical mass on the part of average folk to rise up against big tech to fight back, no matter how much information you show them, or how much you explain the dire need.

davehtaylor , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

"Question every narrative, but don't question these things. Don't show bias, but here are your biases." These chuds don't even hear themselves. They just want to see Arya(n) ramble on about great replacement theory or trans women in bathrooms. They don't think their bile is hate speech because they think they're on the side of "facts" and everyone else is an idiot who refuses to see reality. It's giving strong "I'm not a bigot, "<" minority ">" really is like that. It's science" vibes.

davehtaylor , 2 months ago

Our monetary system isn't the problem. Capitalism is the problem, and cryptocurrency is not the solution to that. It exacerbates it.

davehtaylor , 2 months ago

For far too long, there's been this idea in tech spaces that a person, regardless of how shitty they are, is automatically deserving of adulation because they're some "10x" developer. That soft skills, and wider understanding of the landscape, are completely unnecessary. They think it's "meritocracy" where all that matters is the code you deliver, and you can be the shittiest person on the planet otherwise. It's created so much toxicity, so much hostility, and driven so many people away. And it's so much more apparent in OSS spaces where pull requests seem to be the only currency people have to wield.

Those kinds of attitudes completely pushed me away from participating is nearly all Linux/OSS communities. I used to be really active on a number of forums and in irc. But that kind of shit became so overbearing it just wasn't worth it anymore. Not to mention the fact that it felt like 75% of the people there were also 4channers and well on their way down the alt-right rabbit hole.

davehtaylor , 2 months ago

Exactly!

Plus, it's not really a matter of being able to withhold your money from a company, when you bought a game 20 years ago and don't want to see it disappear, or if you're trying to buy a game from 20 years ago that is no longer sold. People would literally throw money at companies if they just kept games available somehow. But "I won't buy the next game you release if you delete my digital purchases" isn't a viable method of protest. The money the company thinks they're "saving" by doing so far outweighs any losses from your non-purchases

davehtaylor , 2 months ago

Elon Musk has fired a significant number of employees across different instances. Specifically, Musk has fired over 6,000 people at Twitter since taking over the company, reducing the staff to around 1,500 employees. Additionally, Musk sacked around 3,700 Twitter employees in the first week of November after acquiring the company, and further layoffs followed, resulting in a substantial reduction in the workforce. Overall, considering these instances and others not explicitly mentioned in the provided sources, Elon Musk has fired thousands of employees across various companies and contexts.

This opening paragraph is absolutely written either by an AI, or someone with a 6th grade understanding of writing. It's painful to read.

davehtaylor , 2 months ago

If that's your view of it, then you truly do not understand how businesses operate (especially larger companies). "Hey this is free, let's switch to this!" isn't a pitch. There are so many factors to consider: service, support, contracts, deployment, on and on and on. It would be great if every business adopted OSS, but they're not going to. And that's not a failure of one employee to convince a Fortune 500 company, for example, that LO would be a cost-saving measure.

davehtaylor , 2 months ago

The point is that those "thousand" benefits for LO do not matter. That's simply not how businesses run. It would be great if it were, but it isn't. And your experience as an individual user with MS support is completely irrelevant with regard to business support.

davehtaylor , 2 months ago

in alot of countries, having WhatsApp becomes a must.

Why is this? I hear this a lot, but I don't understand

davehtaylor , 2 months ago

Yeah, but name a single big box retailer that takes a cryptocurrency at the point of sale? You can't because none do. Having to find an ATM to be able to complete a transaction isn't scalable. And for retailers, seconds count at the PoS. So if it takes any significant time at all to process a transaction, they're not going to do it. Further, they're not going to eat the kind of fees that crypto brings along with it. Same reason a lot of retailers don't take AmEx, for example. The transaction fees are outrageous. So as a retailer you either eat it, which most won't, or you pass the cost on to the customer, and alienate your customers.

Until you can walk into a McDonalds or a Walmart and swipe or tap something at their payment terminal to pay with your cryptocoin, it's not going to be viable. And I'm not talking about exchanging it for cash, and then paying. I'm talking about the retailer actually accepting the coin.

As a currency, crypto has utterly failed. It's nothing but a speculator market, and an extremely dirty and volatile one at that.

davehtaylor , 2 months ago

This is pure cruelty for the sake of cruelty

davehtaylor , 2 months ago

Think of the Internet as the US Interstate Highway system. The web is a chain of tourist attractions you can visit along those roads.

The Internet is the physical and logical collection of interconnected networks. The web is a protocol that runs on top of that infrastructure, just as email, ssh, ftp, irc, etc. do.

davehtaylor , 2 months ago

But it's not muddy though. The Internet is the infrastructure that the web runs across. And there are still plenty of other protocols out there beside the web that are in use every single day. Even if the average user were to primarily use the Internet for accessing the web, it doesn't mean the definitions of the two have become muddy. Interstate 4 is not Walt Disney World, even if you only ever drive I-4 to get to Disney.

davehtaylor , 3 months ago

Yeah, this is strange. They fork a repo, but clearly have no idea what they're doing. Or they thought they'd just grab the code before it went down, and had no plan on what to do with it. Their website doesn't work. The readme says "Most of the development happens on GitHub" even though they're on GitLab.

davehtaylor , 3 months ago

Many users on Lemmy seem actively hostile to the idea of decentralization in a way that feels self defeating. They don’t want a better alternative to Reddit, they just want Reddit 2.0 and attempts to sway them towards something better feels like pulling teeth.

I keep seeing this, and I don't really understand. Lemmy is a link aggregator that allows users to organize those links into categories/communities/etc, and lets people comment on the links and have discussions about them. From an end-user perspective, that's exactly what Reddit is. So I'm genuinely curious what's meant when people say they don't want Reddit 2.0 from a technical perspective. From a social perspective, the toxicity, brigading, shitposting, etc are definitely not desirable. But with shit moderation tools, those sort of things don't get sorted, and federation just magnifies all of those problems. Though I think disabling voting definitely helps discourage shitposting and low-effort responses.

But I genuinely do think a lot of problems really come down to the fundamentals of federation. And given how many downsides there are to it, I'm not convinced it's actually a benefit at all.

davehtaylor , 3 months ago

All phone systems are digital now. Even what appears like POTS at the subscriber end turns into VoIP when it reaches the phone company.

davehtaylor , 3 months ago

The thing is that you're both right: your landline at your home would continue to work during a power outage, assuming the central office still had power or there wasn't a mechanical failure there. And if the CO went down, your phone would stop working. And this is a case of the CO going down.

davehtaylor , 3 months ago

Eclipse is a popular IDE that's super customizable and extensible. They have a huge marketplace of plugins. And swear I remember there being a WYSIWYG editor for it, but now that I'm searching, it seems there might not be anymore.

I definitely understand the pain though.

We have experimented with CMS options, but had various issues arising from this - lack of customisation/design flexibility (each individual page we create often has a completely unique design based on the content

I'm a web dev who got their start back in the 90s. I'm also an enthusiast for classic computers and restoring them. One of the biggest problems is that older web browsers won't view anything with HTTPS, have no idea how to render modern web languages, and modern browsers make a mess of classic sites (though this is also an effect of much larger screen resolutions). So I was working on a project to try to build sites on the modern web that older browsers could view, using like HTML3, with no CSS nor JS. I had this ambitious idea that maybe there was a way to create a CMS that could build older sites like that. I was trying to use a headless CMS that I could take content from with a modern frontend for a modern experience, and then build a backend that could wrap the content up in 90s-tastic style. And it's possible if you want just a generic, bland and basic site. But if you want anything that looks like things did then, it's impossible. Like you mentioned, everything was so bespoke. so often pages then were built largely with images: navigation, layout, styling, etc. Everything was so unique, custom, and specific to the site. It wasn't like now where everything is based on the exact same grid, or Bootstrap theme, or WP theme.

The sad part is that there were so many WYSIWYG editors back then that you could use, and even web-based ones (Angelfire, Tripod, Geocities, etc) but all that's gone now. I did find a copy of Dreamweaver 1 and 2 on MacintoshGarden and gave that a spin for a bit on an old PowerMac G4. That was fun, but I can't remember if they had a Windows version during the 90s. Though as hard as it is to get even 10 year old software to run on Win 10 and 11, that probably wouldn't work anyway.

Long-winded way to say: the divide between the 90s and now, wrt web tech, is vast. Not sure how close this is to what you're trying to do, but thought I'd share it.

davehtaylor , 3 months ago

This is the worst part: there is literally zero action in Congress to codify the right to reproductive care on a federal level (or equal rights, protections for trans health care, pushing back against book bans, education takeovers, or any other attack on LGBTQ+ folk). Congress knew for over a month that SCOTUS was going to kill Roe, and they did literally nothing. And since then, they have done literally nothing. There is simply no one at the fucking helm. No one is even trying to stop this fascist bullshit. The entire goddamned country is going to be a collection of conservative hellscapes, and Congressional Dems will still be trying to "reach across the aisle" and making sure to maintain "decorum" when it's too late to do anything about it.

davehtaylor , 3 months ago

In a just world, the idea of SEO shouldn't even exist. You shouldn't be able to game an algorithm to rise to the top. But that's what literally our entire world has become now. Social media influencers, scammy and spammy websites and services, AI art thieves, content farm sewage. None of it would exist if the algorithms didn't let you game them or promote certain behaviors.

davehtaylor , 3 months ago

"Bad guys are going to do bad things, so we shouldn't even bother trying to do anything to make things better, and just let the dystopia happen" is not the answer

davehtaylor , 3 months ago

If you don't see how even the most basic of AI images, videos, deepfakes, etc. can manipulate the public, the electorate, popular opinion, or even sow just enough doubt as a cause a problem, then I don't know what to tell you.

People are already dying because of deepfakes and fake AI porn. We know that most people who see some headline on Facebook will never click farther to read it, and will just accept the headline and/or the synopsis as fact. They will accept something a 1000x re-shared image says, without sources or verification. The fact that a picture or vid might have a person with 8 fingers on one hand in the background isn't going to prevent them from taking in the message. And we've all literally seen people around the web say , explicitly, something to the effect of "I don't care if the story is true or not, it's a real issue we need to consider" when we know for a fact that it is not.

Yes, mis- and dis-information are far more of an existential thread than chem or bio weapons, and we know this because we are already seeing the consequences of it. If you refuse to see that, then you are lost.

davehtaylor , 3 months ago

I’m not so worried about these technologies landing in the hands of adversaries that I think we should abandon our values or beliefs Just In Case

What beliefs and values would we be abandoning by fighting back against tech that is literally costing people their literal lives?

davehtaylor , 3 months ago

Ah gotcha. I must have misunderstood the flow there. Yeah, definitely seems like we're mostly on the same side

davehtaylor , 3 months ago

Of course they picked a more deadly option.

Elon specifically said that if a CT gets into an accident with another vehicle, the CT "wins". Which is such a fucking horrifying way to think about automotive safety. Same thing from people who bitch about how "your car gets totaled in even the lowest speed crash nowadays" when doing so is precisely what saves your life. Totalling a car and allowing you to walk away with only minor injuries or none at all, it is the point, but people like him have this idea that it's more manly to die in easily avoidable ways than it is to observe safety measures that we've known about for decades.

davehtaylor , 3 months ago

Hear fucking hear.

This has nothing to do with realizing the technology promise of the 90s, or "lowering barriers to entry," or user freedom, and everything to do with clear-cutting the entire technology scene. Handing everything over to LLMs isn't the way to fight the corps, because they're going to take those same tools, and destroy incalculable numbers of developer careers, destroy software quality, and anything else they can, just so they can pad their bottom line. And we will be significantly worse off for it.

Also, I am so fucking sick of language like "I don’t want this power to be constrained to a priesthood who know the secret language of coding." OP sounds like those people who think artists are "gatekeeping" art, and that AI image generators are "democratizing" art. It's so fucking disingenuous and gross. No one is gatekeeping anything. Anyone can pick up a pencil, or download a free drawing app and make art. Just like anyone can follow countless numbers of free YouTube vids and online tutorials to learn how to be an Android dev. There's no fucking priesthood or soldier at the gate preventing anyone from doing anything.

This whole article is nothing but AI/LLM apologietics wrapped up in FLOSS language.

davehtaylor , 3 months ago

How do we welcome these contributions while lowering risk?

We don't. These contributions should not be welcomed. At all. And they bring nothing BUT risk.

davehtaylor , 3 months ago

The Taliban blew up huge statues of Buddhas that had stood for 1500 years because they'd suddenly decided they were blasphemous. They would absolutely hijack a queer forum so they could hunt down any user who might be in Afghanistan