Kinda what I meant by plastics

I’m more worried about the plastic, pesticides, degraded pharmaceuticals and heavy metals myself

You underestimate the power of addiction.

The official app isn’t a bad thing because it’s buggy and has ads, that sucks but I’ve used much worse apps that offer less. The amount of ads and how easy they are to click accidentally is ridiculous though

It’s bad because it’s built to do what Facebook did - it always gives you something to see and a reason to keep going. Have a nice, curated mix of science and shit posts? Let’s throw some crap from the front page in there along with the ads! No one responded to your comments? We’ll make suggestions look like someone is interacting with you! Haven’t used the app in a few hours? Here’s some posts delivered in a notification to get you back in there

I left Facebook for Reddit because I realized I didn’t really enjoy it and often ended up feeling worse after using, and when the experiments they were doing came out I payed close attention. It was a real slap in the face when I saw Reddit doing similar stuff, and I checked out alternatives like tildes but nothing else was scratching the itch so I put it on the back burner.

For those of us who aren’t going back, this wakeup call was a blessing. It’s a strong reminder that corporations not only don’t care about us, they can’t - they might act friendly sometimes, but they wouldn’t hesitate to poison the water supply if they thought it would bring greater profits

I like the game grumps and Lex Fridman. The documentaries are cool, but I have to watch them in a different container or YouTube will start feeding me 30 minute ads or rants that sound reasonable but are super bigoted and flawed when you actually think about it

Reddit meant more to me than anything else I do online, and I committed to leaving it behind even before I found Lemmy… YouTube is barely worth it even without the ads. And I’ve got a whole fediverse of video content to investigate

Delete your history and be very selective in what you watch, and YouTube is pretty decent… At least for a few months. After that, either you stuck to your preferences and end up looping over the same content, or you branched out and now it keeps trying to feed you rants full of dog whistles

I use Firefox and containers along with unlock origin - by using the containers strictly for several narrow interests, YouTube acts like ad free tv for me - perfect background noise

I liked GTA V, but I spent my whole time with rdr2 just being like “everyone loves this game, what am I missing? Maybe if I make it to the next act it’ll open up more”.

It was beautiful, the world felt alive, the mechanics were good, but it’s like instead of making a game with the wonderful foundation they built, they decided they’d rather tell a story than make a game.

I loved the hunting, the bounty quests were kind of ok, the gunfights were ok even if they were so repetitive they felt procedural, but I just couldn’t care about the story they shoved down your throat.

I wanted to build up the settlement and have to run around robbing trains to come up with money, I don’t want to do a 5 minute ride while the characters give exposition through dialogue, fight a few waves of enemies, then ride off - rinse and repeat.

I wanted to grind progression through upgrading weapons and gear, but the upgrades are minimal, new guns are linked to story progression, and while hunting was fun the legendaries were just tedious jumping through hoops

I mean the reason people believe that is because it’s a very explicit language. It knows what’s in its memory at all times, and so at the lower layers it’s more secure by nature.

As opposed to php, you’re less likely to introduce a vulnerability by being sloppy with data sanitation - the language demands you tell it exactly the data structures you want it to put into memory. For that reason, the language is more secure - the parse json function is going to be less likely to be able to run rogue code maliciously embedded inside it than php, and if it does manage to do so, it’s easier to write php to blindly open a hole in the system from inside an interpreter than it is to break out of or hijack the runtime.

Obviously that doesn’t make it secure. It just means that all else being equal, rust is less vulnerable to a sloppy mistake at any given layer in the stack. Doesn’t mean you can’t make a logical mistake and open up a glaring security hole

And obviously you can write bulletproof php code, but every layer of the stack needs to be just as bulletproof. Including the interpreter and all your libraries - which historically were very much not bulletproof (it’s definitely much more strict than it used to be, and I think I heard fb tried compilation and I’m not sure if that’s become a thing, but it’s generally is more secure than interpretation for similar reasons)

All that being said, humans are just dumb and sloppy. We write shit code, and we try to minimize the surface area for mistakes. Rust has a much smaller surface area than php

My dad likes to send me videos. He sent me one yesterday… It seemed like he was at a harbor by the 8 pixels that got through

He also frequently emails me from his phone. I used to ask him to send videos to my email. Even tried to coach him through the process -surely they must have a share button?

I think iPhones are designed around the idea that “either it just works, or you shouldn’t be doing it at all”.

Even my technical friends seem to forget the fact they understand how all of this works the minute they look at their phone - I had to coach one through uploading a larger video to Google drive and sending me the link. My brother in Christ, we use GitHub together. We use Google meets regularly. We used Dropbox in college. Why are you acting like I told you to put it on a flash drive and mail it to me?

That’s the one thing I’ll miss completely. I’m really into consent, and girls posting just to show off does something that porn alone doesn’t

Maybe Lemmy will get there, but I’ve seen nothing like that so far

Well on the plus side, it pushed me over the edge to start making the first 3rd party client.

What do you think of the name flemmy?

You can spoof the user-agent, it’s a PITA but not that hard. I did it to use chat gpt with bing, but didn’t bother for Reddit

I recommend libreddit, no commenting and it’s slower, but at least it works on mobile

So, for a long time I’ve believed Elon is actually pretty dumb. He’s impulsive, was bad at programming, and frequently gets facts/figures absurdly wrong

But then there’s that chat log between him and other billionaires… It circled around the idea of private companies bring free to shape social media being an existential threat

He’s tanked Twitter and publicly boasts about how he turned it around and made it profitable through actions that drove people away from the platform. There’s no way the numbers work from what we knew before it went private, and they’ve stopped paying their bills - his claims are almost certainly false

And yet, social media companies are listening - frankly, they probably don’t care if it’s true. If rich shareholders believe it, then by copying his methods their stock price will jump. Reddit and discord have started new initiatives that piss off their users since then… None of the methods will immediately collapse a network, but they’re generally targeted towards driving away both power users and rockstar employees. It will starve the networks of content over time, leading to a tower of babble moment where the platform disperses-leaving smaller and fewer locuses of control on pubic discourse

So I keep coming back to this idea - is he a doing a zero-requiem and becoming the villain to inoculate us as a species against control by billionaires?

But then I think back to his ego, and think he’s probably just blundering a role he’s unqualified for.

But then, he does something else so dumb it seems like an intentional fumble, and it gets me thinking again

It’s seriously disturbing from a mental health perspective. They’re doing exactly the same things Facebook did that made it most damaging

The app always gives you something, it will add filler (in the form of front-page content) to your feed, changing the reward schedule and (very literally) training you to doom scroll longer with fewer posts you actually care about. It also gives the opportunity to shove something controversial in your face, which drives outrage based engagement

It also always gives you messages - if you didn’t get actual replies, it gives you sub suggestions or puts random posts in your notifications to try to get you back in the app

They also been doing A/B testing to try to maximize in-app time

It’s a literal recipe for addiction

Yeah, that sounds poorly thought out and would probably turn into a huge mess. Pretty par for the course at this point

Let me know if you figure it out, I had to do it through the browser