streetfestival

streetfestival , 5 days ago

I’d say in about 2 years, the entire place is going to be bots with AI generated content that try to mimic “real users” using their new Dynamic Product Ads tool

Yeah, it's just partially like that now lol. A few weeks ago there was a side-by-side reddit screenshot post on Lemmy. It showed the exact same reddit post, with the exact same tens of comments (all word for word, some in response to each other iirc), from different accounts less than a year apart. 100% fabrication. I'd never seen such extensive bot-masquerading as people behaviour; it was a realization moment for me

streetfestival OP , 18 days ago (edited 18 days ago)

Another problem caused by greedflation: companies want to collect both money and data for every usage (edit: I forgot to include "push ads in your face" as well)

streetfestival OP , 18 days ago

So true. As others have remarked on here, entshittification really changes the calculus of "is piracy worth it?"

streetfestival OP , 18 days ago

I appreciate you sharing that! Sounds like you got a good thing going

streetfestival OP , 18 days ago

Ah yes, neo-feudalism, I think

streetfestival OP , 18 days ago

You are so right

streetfestival OP , 18 days ago

I understand your pause on purchasing the robot vacuum. So many of these devices seem designed to collect every bit of your data that they can get their hands on, ostensibly justified by some veneer of convenience to the customer (ie, data livestock) or their 'safety' or 'privacy' (lol). As someone with lesser tech knowledge than you do to manage such data siphoning, I think it's safe to say I'll never be interested in owning a robot vacuum

streetfestival OP , 18 days ago

I appreciate the rec's! I did check out gog a bit a month or so ago and thought it did look refreshingly different

streetfestival OP , 18 days ago

I might've misspoke about never paying for a video game again. I do like the look of gog. I'm really out of the loop when it comes to gaming. I like more privacy- and ownership-respecting platforms, and I would (do) pay for those. What I meant was I'd caught a glimpse of the direction of the mainstream gaming industry with WC3, and I realized it wouldn't work for me and had to get off it. I use LibreOffice. I'll check out the libre gaming software, thanks!

They’ll obviously win when we run away. We should take the fight to them.

I appreciate your point of view. The way I see it, I think maybe 95/100 people blindly trust big tech companies and 5 of us don't (to the willing we'll avoid mainstream social media, for example); the proportion is debatable, but I think it's a very uneven divide. I don't think we have enough power to "stick it" to big tech. I also don't think we need to. I participated in the reddit blackout last summer and then I left it altogether for here (Lemmy), which I enjoy more and want to help grow more than I did the last place. I guess I do want some people to keep big tech in check and whistle-blow, at least to help spread awareness. I guess I'm just not the person for the job, and I think that's okay. More tech savvy people would do well in those roles :)

streetfestival OP , 18 days ago

I was under the impression that the second part of that saying was deliberately facetious or sarcastic lol

streetfestival OP , 18 days ago

Great points! Ownership, control, access, possession - these might apply differently to different things. I could see ownership being more relevant than other concepts in digital documentation of one's genetic information, for example. I think a public library model (ie, access) would work pretty satisfactorily for entertainment media. Our language might have lagged behind the privacy, consumer, and legal concerns of today. My knowledge certainly has, but that can be changed ;)

streetfestival OP , 18 days ago

Thank you very much, kind Lemmy! I think it makes sense for me to postpone that a bit due to other things going on at the moment. But it was really helpful to vent and to hear words of empathy and support from people like you :)

streetfestival OP , 18 days ago

I appreciate your comments and good points!

WHY DON’T YOU WANT PERSONALIZED ADVERTISEMENTS?

Lol. I prefer the terms user-preferred advertisements or user-centric advertisements /s. Whenever I see targeted ads, I just think it's creepy

streetfestival OP , 18 days ago

Thanks, Blisterexe - you too :)

streetfestival OP , 18 days ago

It's a little beyond me, but I was under the impression that the dictionary lookup feature is purely local. Saying that out loud I'm now not so sure lol

streetfestival OP , 18 days ago

Thanks for the info! I general sail the seven seas for that suff but thought it was a pretty good example of the larger trend.

I played guitar for 5+ years, never really learning properly, but being able to jam okay. I can't do that any more, but I have a pretty good knowledge base to start from. It's probably a matter of I should just do whatever's fun until I'm picking up the guitar a few times a week regularly - then I can get more focused. For easy-starting fun, that's probably strumming and singing through songs on a less ad and malware-bloated website. To get serious, I'd like to work with a metronome, maybe finally feel confident with a 12-bar blues, transcribe some solos perhaps. Very old school 😎. Do you play or want to learn?

streetfestival OP , 18 days ago

I think I'm more or less with @verdigris. I'd get behind the position that most large corporations have bent the rules of society so much to their favour and accrued so much wealth at the expense of ordinary people that we don't owe them anything at this point. I got mad respect for the independent creators. But I feel there's no moral transgression with streaming a pirated show vis-a-vis the corporations missing out on making a few bucks from that, to use a example. It's not black and white; actors and others salaries are important and related. But those "you wouldn't steal a car, so why are you trying to a CD/DVD?" ads were clearly corporate propaganda, as another example

streetfestival OP , 18 days ago

What would a child say if they were asked whether they would steal a loaf of bread to feed their starving family if they had no other way of saving them? What would you say? Does context matter in moral judgements?

streetfestival OP , 17 days ago

Great advice, thank you!! What you said applies to me quite a bit

streetfestival , 1 month ago

Too soon

streetfestival , 2 months ago

If you only can call out horror when it’s history, what is journalism good for?

Because if you obscure the fact that this is a colonial dynamic, then it’s much easier to just present what has happened, both in the longer term and since October 7, as “Israel is just a country defending itself.”

they’re all obscuring that at the time of the post–World War I British mandate in Palestine, the population of Palestine was 90% Palestinians. And even when the UN issued its 1947 partition plan, Palestinians owned more than 94% of the land between the river and the sea.

So you can’t understand the basic hinge point in this war, like the fact that most people in Gaza, 70% of them or thereabouts, are refugees, without understanding that they got to be refugees because creating a colonial state in Palestine required expelling 750,000 Palestinians and also their descendants.

But that is sort of built into the commercial orientation of the media system, that there are many considerations that have nothing to do with serving the public good by helping provide the populace with the information that we need and a range of possible lenses to think about them. What we see instead is an orientation toward minimizing atrocities carried out by countries like the United States and Canada and their allies, which, in the case of Israel, is less an ally than an appendage.

streetfestival , 3 months ago

Yup. https://www.reuters.com/technology/intel-get-32-billion-government-grant-new-25-billion-israel-chip-plant-2023-12-26/

streetfestival , 3 months ago

FWIW: I'm always on VPN and I've never had an issue with lemmy.ca

streetfestival , 3 months ago

DuckDuckGo browser is available for android

streetfestival , 3 months ago

I like the art! I had a laugh when I got to the 4th panel and then another when I realized the bear had a bong for some reason in the 1st panel :D

streetfestival , 3 months ago

Well played ;)

streetfestival , 3 months ago

This was cute and uplifting :)

streetfestival , 3 months ago

The corded phone is my favourite part :P

streetfestival , 3 months ago

I think the tech companies believe they'll get good PR for a bill that purports to be about child safety. In actuality, the bill will allow them to censor anything they want on their platforms while sidestepping criticism about curtailing free speech because they can say "we're just trying not to get sued; if you have a problem, take it up with Washington"

streetfestival , 3 months ago

In the fall, Jezebel reported how a bipartisan bill ostensibly meant to protect children from harmful content online could be weaponized by Republican politicians to censor everything from LGBTQ+ content to sex ed info to abortion resources—and for all internet users, not just children.

This is so dystopian

streetfestival , 4 months ago

Thank you, kind Lemmy, I appreciate it. Getting down-voted and mocked for trying to add context that some might find useful (judgeing by the title and top-rated comment) is one of the more negative experiences I've had on Lemmy

streetfestival , 4 months ago

Editor's summary of original article published in Science:

When intact, the Amazonian forest is dense and difficult to penetrate, both on foot and with scanning technologies. Over the past several years, however, improved light detection and ranging scans have begun to penetrate the forest canopy, revealing previously unknown evidence of past Amazonian cultures. Rostain et al. describe evidence of such an agrarian Amazonian culture that began more than 2000 years ago. They describe more than 6000 earthen platforms distributed in a geometic pattern connected by roads and intertwined with agricultural landscapes and river drainages in the Upano Valley. Previous efforts have described mounds and large monuments in Amazonia, but the complexity and extent of this development far surpasses these previous sites. —Sacha Vignieri