I’m afraid what you wrote was not purely what you state here, and to the extent it was, poorly so.
I don’t think I’m the one here for whom the message is lost.
I’m afraid what you wrote was not purely what you state here, and to the extent it was, poorly so.
I don’t think I’m the one here for whom the message is lost.
Ha, ok. Well I think your response is rude, meaningless, petulant, and a waste of space.
But I’m really glad we have people like you on social media to remind us what it’s all about.
Many, myself included, may not like to hear this, but I think it’s the bitter truth.
For better or worse, the majority like this technology. AI companies have stuck the landing in a sales sense.
For those who find it cringey or offensive or whatever, we may have to get used to being black sheep (even more).
Huh, didn’t know. Thanks!
Prepare yourself:
Clinton, Trump and Bush Jr were all born in the “summer” of 1946.
Since 1992, 32 years ago, there has been a presidential candidate from the summer of 1946 for 7 elections (trump 3 times now) or 28 years worth.
Additionally, H Clinton was the “fall” of 1947, Romney the “spring” of 1947, Gore the “spring” of 1948.
Obama, McCain, Kerry and Biden are the only exceptions to the core Boomer generation of a 2 year window dominating presidential elections for ~35yrs.
With Biden and Kerry kinda being older boomers, born in ~1942/3 and Obama a young boomer at ~1960. Harris and Walz (and Vance too) mark a generational step change to X-gen and millennials
So ... can we like finally dismiss Google Chrome as the obviously awful idea it is and which should never have made it this far and remind all of the web devs married to it that they're doing bad things and are the reason why we can't have nice things?
Hmmm ... a web browser owned by a monopolistic advertising company ... how could that possibly go wrong??!!

It feels like the big elephant in the room about shorter work weeks and more remote work is that lower level employee productivity is not the issue with them (likely at all).
And it isn't even that managers and higher-ups have some biases against such schemes (which they certainly do).
It's that such schemes put a clearer focus on the actual role managers and higher-ups are supposed to be performing, namely organising employees and their tasks and priorities into coherent and well-planned projects. Managers are, on average, not actually good at this. And the problem is systemic ... the average work culture doesn't have a good sense of what this looks like. Instead, there are "glue people" all over the place, working beyond their roles to fill in the gaps and keep things together.
But, with a less "monolithic", co-located and co-active workforce, the need for actual coordination beyond "do the things! LFG!!" becomes very real, and very anxious for people who either don't know how to do that or don't want the world to find out that things were actually working fine in spite of their inability to do it. A remote and discretely scheduled workforce necessarily asks accountability questions like "who is responsible for planning this?" and "this isn't my responsibility, you need to get someone else to do it" etc.
Managers and higher-ups aren't comfortable with their actual value being scrutinised more closely. And in many ways, it's actually understandable ... as they likely don't know the answer themselves.
Yea, academics need to just shut the publication system down. The more they keep pandering to it the more they look like fools.
The moment word was that Reddit (and now Stackoverflow) were tightening APIs to then sell our conversations to AI was when the game was given away. And I'm sure there were moments or clues before that.
This was when the "you're the product if its free" arrangement metastasised into "you're a data farming serf for a feudal digital overlord whether you pay or not".
Google search transitioning from Good search engine for the internet -> Bad search engine serving SEO crap and ads -> Just use our AI and forget about the internet is more of the same. That their search engine is dominated by SEO and Ads is part of it ... the internet, IE other people's content isn't valuable any more, not with any sovereignty or dignity, least of all the kind envisioned in the ideals of the internet.
The goal now is to be the new internet, where you can bet your ass that there will not be any Tim Berners-Lee open sourcing this. Instead, the internet that we all made is now a feudal landscape on which we all technically "live" and in which we all technically produce content, but which is now all owned, governed and consumed by big tech for their own profits.
I recall back around the start of YouTube, which IIRC was the first hype moment for the internet after the dotcom crash, there was talk about what structures would emerge on the internet ... whether new structures would be created or whether older economic structures would impose themselves and colonise the space. I wasn't thinking too hard at the time, but it seemed intuitive to that older structures would at least try very hard to impose themselves.
But I never thought anything like this would happen. That the cloud, search/google, mega platforms and AI would swallow the whole thing up.
It’s interesting to see Torvalds emerge as a kind of based tech hero. I’m thinking here also of his rant not long ago on social.kernel.org (a kernel devs microblog instance) that was essentially a pretty good anti-anti-leftism tirade in true Torvalds fashion.
EDIT:
Torvalds's anti-anti-left post (I was curious to read it again):
I think you might want to make sure you don’t follow me.
Because your “woke communist propaganda” comment makes me think you’re a moron of the first order.
I strongly suspect I am one of those “woke communists” you worry about. But you probably couldn’t actually explain what either of those words actually mean, could you?
I’m a card-carrying atheist, I think a woman’s right to choose is very important, I think that “well regulated militia” means that guns should be carefully licensed and not just randomly given to any moron with a pulse, and I couldn’t care less if you decided to dress up in the “wrong” clothes or decided you’d rather live your life without feeling tied to whatever plumbing you were born with.
And dammit, if that all makes me “woke”, then I think anybody who uses that word as a pejorative is a f*cking disgrace to the human race. So please just unfollow me right now.
Ok ... so I think false preconceptions are polluting this topic. Apart from the passwords, nothing serious has happened here for your data. As for the DMs ... yea there aren't DMs with any real privacy on the fediverse, they don't exist ... you should presume DMs are public.
Because the fediverse is not in any way private. See for a good treatment of this: https://blog.bloonface.com/2023/07/04/the-fediverse-is-a-privacy-nightmare/
The basic story is that the fediverse is all about duplicating what we post all over the place ... essentially to anyone who decides to run a server on the fediverse. The FBI could (and probably do?) have a server scooping up all sorts of stuff onto their server and you wouldn't know about and probably couldn't do much about it. Google is scraping mastodon (and probably lemmy?) ... try a google search for mastoodn content.
This is all public internet stuff, you're basically running a public blog that happens to be well connected to lots of other public blogs.
As nice as the fediverse is as a nice anti-capitalist-big-corp monopolisation of our social online lives ... it is very much born out of the web2.0 era and doesn't have any of the privacy concerns many of us would now hope for from technologies.
I've argued this elsewhere ... I like the fediverse and am here out of principle ... but in many ways it highlights some of the failings of our world at this time ... because it's about 10 years too late and the future is coming in hot and fast ... in retrospect I wouldn't be surprised if it will make a lot of sense to look back on the fediverse and think that it was effectively redundant at just about the time it gained popularity. An AI dominated internet with massive privacy concerns is here very soon, and the fediverse isn't ready IMO, it's still trying to catch up to web2.0 big social circa 2010.
A shallow response I know, but … what the hell timeline is this!!??