You can’t have this both ways.

When a magat in the Senate brings in a snowball and says that global warming isn’t happening because it’s snowing…

“That’s weather not climate!”

When there’s a wildfire somewhere…

“That’s global warming!”

We can definitively say that this year is the hottest year on record, but we can’t attribute individual forest fires or tornadoes or hurricanes to climate change.

If we’re going to electrify everything we need nuclear power plants.

The federal government should be dumping tens of billions of dollars into modular nuclear plants that can be built in a factory and then shipped places.

Spoiler alert: The civilization disrupting aspects of climate change are still decades out and the rich countries will probably be fine.

They’ll be fine because they can afford the infrastructure projects and increased costs of energy and food.

Now Africa, South America, the poorer Asian countries, tiny Pacific Island nations… Oh boy. I would not want to be a citizen there in 20 or 30 years.

Eventually sea level rise will become a really big fucking problem, like for every single coastal city in the world, even the rich ones. Luckily none of us will be around to see that unless some sort of miraculous life extension technology becomes available.

On the one hand I don’t like mentioning this because it gives the right wing ammunition to ignore climate change. But on the other hand some people have such existential dread about it that it’s damaging their mental health, they are really overestimating how damaging it will be in their lifetime in their rich country they live in.

If they weren’t paid there would just be way more sponsorship deals and ad reads.

YouTube has some competitors…

Twitch - Not for general purpose video uploads and sort of stingy with how much you can upload. Twitch only saves highlights and YouTube saves everything you’ve ever uploaded.

Tiktok - Chinese spyware. Every video is vertical. Every video has stupid songs playing in the background and that TikTok logo. Not really for long form videos or anything serious.

Vimeo - You pay them to upload your video.

I’m glad they stopped recommending things to me with my history off. I just want to see my subscriptions I don’t want to see what the algorithm thinks I want to see.

deleted by creator

The harder and more complicated something is the bigger barrier to entry there is to competing against it.

When video games were simple and fit on a single floppy disk or tape - a single person could develop an entire commercially released game. John Romero could make Dangerous Dave in a week or two, by himself.

Now that games are like Grand Theft Auto V they require hundreds of millions of dollars to create with teams of hundreds of people over nearly a decade. The voice acting in motion capture alone cost many many times more than a game would cost to make in the '80s.

The same goes with web browsers. Chromium is open source and free, it works well, so why spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to make your own new thing?

What benefit did Microsoft get from spending all that money on EdgeHTML versus just using Chromium? None. That’s why they switched to Chromium.

Oh… so to answer your question no one is “allowing” a few tech companies to denominate, just the complexity and cost of creating new products leads to these natural monopolies sort of forming. You’re free to spend the tens of millions of dollars to make your own browser if you want to and break up this domination. I doubt you’ll do it you’ll probably just use Chromium.

From: Leia@royal.ald

Subject: Deathstar plans

I thought many worlds meant every single possible divergent quantum thingy gets its own universe. There is a universe where a single potassium atom in a banana in my kitchen doesn’t decay and there is another universe where that same potassium atom does decay. Multiply that for every single particle in the universe, right?

I guess even if that was true on a macroscopic level that’s not going to guarantee that every possible thing happens?

The smartphone is the only science fiction thing we have.

We didn’t get table top fusion reactors, food pills, Rosie the robot, casual commercial space travel, flying cars, hoverboards, etc…

But we did get a little computer we can carry around that has literally everything in it. It’s a camera, it’s camcorder, it’s a microcassette voice recorder, computer, telephone, book, TV, video conference system, remote control for all my lights, remote control for the TV, a McDonald’s ordering device, instant messenger, magazine, radio, GPS for my car, GPS tracker for my family, health monitoring device, flashlight, Sears catalog - It would probably be harder to come up with a list of things that it can’t do.

You can take my smartphone from my cold dead hands.

The average Twitter user has no idea what Mastodon is.

Facebook doesn’t use e2e.

There is a private chat e2e feature, but then your chats don’t show up on PC.

I had to log into my 84-year-old grandmother’s YouTube account and unsubscribe from a bunch of stuff, “Not interested” on a bunch of stuff, subscribed to more mainstream news sources… But it only works for a couple months.

The problem is the algorithm that values viewing time over anything else.

Watch a news clip from a real news source and then it recommends Fox News. Watch Fox News and then it recommends PragerU. Watch PragerU and then it recommends The Daily Wire. Watch that and then it recommends Steven Crowder. A couple years ago it would go even stupider than Crowder, she’d start getting those videos where it’s computer voice talking over stock footage about Hillary Clinton being arrested for being a demonic pedophile. Luckily most of those channels are banned at this point or at least the algorithm doesn’t recommend them.

I’ve thought about putting her into restricted mode, but I think that would be too obvious that I’m manipulating the strings in the background.

Then I thought she’s 84, she’s going to be dead in a few years, she doesn’t vote, does it really matter that she’s concerned about trans people trying to cut off little boy’s penises or thinks that Obama is wearing ankle monitor because he was arrested by the Trump administration or that aliens are visiting the Earth because she heard it on Joe Rogan?

Why do Linux nerds that care about this sort of stuff hate snaps so much?

Is it the concept of snaps / flatpaks that is the issue or snaps specifically because Canonical is behind them?

I know literally nothing about how they work except I installed the VLC snap and it’s fine.

I couldn’t install Parsec (a remote desktop game streaming app) because of a missing dependency (an old version of lib-something codec that wasn’t in my newer version of Ubuntu). I spent like an hour trying to figure out how to take the 18.04 version and add it to 22.10. I don’t know Linux at all so I wasn’t making much progress. Someone, not the developers of Parsec, made a flatpak and it magically worked.

I was afraid that because the flatpak was made by some random guy I couldn’t really trust it. I looked inside the flatpak and it’s seems to be nothing except for the Parsec deb coming straight from the official Parsec URL and that libcodec thing that was causing a problem.

So from my perspective, not knowing the technical details or politics, what’s the problem?

You’re delusional.

The fediverse stuff is just a bullet point on a sales sheet, Facebook doesn’t give a shit about federating with Lemmy or Mastodon or whatever.

The reason they don’t give a shit is they already have a user base that is multiple times larger than Lemmy and Mastodon combined. Also normal people don’t even know what those things are. My mom doesn’t know what Mastodon is, she does know what Twitter and threads is.