araquen

I worked for a guy, many years ago, small scale version of Musk. Guys like that hate to be contradicted. He had gone into partnership with my old company - which was a digital election company (back in the 90s and early 00s). We prided ourselves on our security and anonymity measures. Under this new company, this guy because CEO, and the first thing he did was tell everyone we could make “millions” by selling user data. I pointed out that violated out privacy and anonymity standards, and not even the next day I was reprimanded for speaking out.

You don’t need to be a billionaire to be stupid. Affluent is enough of a threshold. These are all grifters, granted many being successful. The grifters in this company were big fish/little pond. But they ruined a lovely little company that could have been stable and steady, recession-proof income for decades. Instead, they grifted the angel investors, ran the company into the ground and ended up spawning dozens of competitors in the field whereas before there were only 2 or 3.

These guys go from start-up grift to start-up grift, maintaining their affluence on the investor’s dime. I would say they, and the vulture capitalists they dance with deserve each other, but unfortunately, regular folks are always the collateral damage.

Musk was likely always an idiot, but was propped up by money, and earlier on either knew his place (as the “faceman”) or was adroitly distracted from direct involvement with the actual running of the company he bought.

I have always been an avid Mac user, so currently Ventura. That said, I did build a frankenbox when I wasn’t sure what would happen with gaming on my Mac (I don’t have major requirements, quite content with my little corner of MMORPG and the occasion Steam games), and that has Windows 11.

I have worked cross-platform for many years, and frankly I liked the version of Windows where the window art was translucent? Was that Windows 7? I liked that. I really did not like when Microsoft made their OS look like their phone (and yes I am cranky Apple made their desktop OS look similar to their phone).

I have not dabbled in Linux, but that is mostly because I am that most dangerous of users: the one who has partial knowledge and too much curiosity. I’m the person who thought you could upgrade Windows by simply replacing the io subsystem on a desktop with the one from more recent version on a laptop (back in that day, you could take the new system folder off a Mac and put it on a Mac with an oiler version and it would upgrade). It took 2 weeks to rebuild that PC, the entire machine needed to be wiped clean, we had to dig up the install floppies to get the CD to work to be able to use the system CDs to install a fresh copy of the OS. I am a menace to technology. ;-)

I used to prefer contacts, but I am an idiot, and kept forgetting to blink (yeah, that’s a thing), so I would get dry-eyes. So I told my eye doctor I am too stupid to wear contacts, and I have been using glasses ever since. While I miss the freedom contacts affords, I do not miss dry-eyes and the related fatigue.

I wasn’t there for Reddit, but was there for the MySpace/LiveJournal/Facebook/Twitter migrations. There will always be those who are confused, but I have not seen this level of histrionics, most of it coming from those with an agenda.

Regular folks will figure it out.

All this pearl-clutching makes me want to punch a wall.

I initially rejected Mastodon, being overwhelmed by its decentralization. I even proclaimed it “too complicated.”

Not even 8 months later and I’m fine. It’s all fine. My hysteria was sound and fury, signifying nothing. This hysteria is also pointless.

Is the fediverse the exact same experience Twitter and Reddit were? No. Do they need to be? No.

No one pearl-clutched when Facebook wasn’t exactly like LiveJournal or MySpace. No one pitched a fit when texting replaced IM. Folks organically flowed from one platform to the next as need and want allowed.

Technology solutions change and evolve. No platform rules forever.

The conspiracy theorist in me leans towards this being manufactured “concern” because the monetization solution to decentralized architecture isn’t ready for prime time, and “Late Stage Capitalism” is trying to herd the sheep into a temporary enclosure of fear until their new “farm” is ready. This explains why all the financial and corporate entities are singing the praises for Bluesky, and casting doubt on Mastodon. Last I saw, there is no word on how Bluesky is going to be supported, but it has a Board of Directors, which tells me it will be ad and subscription based, which means it needs a lot of people.

Having a Board also means that Bluesky can go public and can be sold to yet another nitwit.

So if long term stability means I am going to have to wake up and do a bit more to shape a fediverse solution to my needs, it’s worth more to me to do that than to go all in on a platform that is going to force ads on me and wind up being sold to the next billionaire imbecile.

I would respectfully disagree. There is an entire system for tracking tips: https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/tip-income-is-taxable-and-must-be-reported and https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/tip-recordkeeping-and-reporting. For another, the whole tipping process was discovered by wealthy Americans:

Wealthy Americans in the 1850s and 1860s discovered the tradition, which had originated in medieval times as a master-serf custom wherein a servant would receive extra money for having performed superbly well, on vacations in Europe. Wanting to seem aristocratic, these individuals began tipping in the United States upon their return. https://time.com/5404475/history-tipping-american-restaurants-civil-war/

In an ideal world, service industry workers would be paid a living wage, and there would be no tips required. That’s how it should be.

Ultimately, tips are a way for “owners" to avoid paying fair wages, using the customer base to subsidize the employee’s wages. I won’t even go into instances where the owners steal tips from their staff.

Do some people under-report tips? Probably. But will most service workers, who can barely afford to survive in this country, incur the risk of being audited by the IRS if they don’t report tips and get penalized thousands of dollars for their meager hundreds? I very much doubt it. And yes, the IRS does go after the little guy - a lot. It’s cheaper than going after rich people with lawyers.

I get where you’re coming from, but this seems to have been the “lazy” answer, and is certainly not a consumer-friendly solution. Ideally there would have been dedicated directories for application configs where the application has permission to write, and the Documents folder would have been left alone.

On the Mac, these days, I believe “Application Support” fills this role, but there are still recalcitrant applications that default to the user’s Documents folder. That said, the devs in my company had to end up using the Documents folder for one of our products, something to do with Apple’s security, so I do sympathize. It’s just irksome, especially when you have to get another app to clean up after the apps you’ve installed because those apps uninstallers do not clean up everything.

I enjoy Beau of the Fifth Column on YouTube. He is soft-spoken and respectful, even if opinions don’t agree. His comments are measured, informed and he will take a mea culpa. He’s mostly US politics, but will cover other topic, including Russia.

This is the big thing I miss from my “pre-Unix” Mac days. In OS9 and earlier, apps were self contained, and didn’t spread their garbage everywhere. You deleted an app, you deleted all the app. Granted, there was a tradeoff (the parade of conflicting control panels and extensions you had to manually diagnose when your machine went sideways) but I never understood why in the Windows and Linux worlds devs would code so sloppily. Who told that dev my Documents folder is where their nonsense needs to go? That Documents folder is for my use, not theirs.

Still salty after all these years

Personally, I think there is way too much overreaction to the defederations. I agree with admins’ reasons, and it is clear that the minute there are sufficient moderation tools available, that the impacted servers will be re-federated.

The pressure is now on the developers to start pushing more iterative moderation tools - something that wasn’t a priority before Reddit decided to implode, and now looks like it needs to be reprioritized. This is a project/project management issue.

The problem isn’t the decision to defederate, it’s that the only solution to handle bad actors is binary. It’s like shaving your head because you have over-dried out hair, when you’d rather just cut the split ends.

I am willing to be patient because I see Lemmy as a long-term engagement. I’ve been off Reddit since the AMA and haven’t had any desire to go back. I’d rather invest the time here and show the devs that prioritizing more iterative mod tools is a good ROI for them.

When something is free, you are the product. Reddit has been a human farm for ages, using effectively “slave” (free) labor to maintain the herd. That massive data trove is now being sold for profit. That’s why it’s so important that Huffman preserve Reddit and is kicking recalcitrant mods (something I predicted would happen).

I admit, I unsubscribed to Reddit and logged off the day of the AMA, after giving Huffman a piece of my mind about his “double dipping.” I was fine paying him for no ads. I would have been fine paying Apollo a small subscription. There was no way I was going to pay Reddit AND Apollo for the use of Reddit, when Apollo was basically going to be forced to collect the money I was already paying Reddit (using the APIs as a blinder).

I am fine leaving behind a ghost account. And while I get the idea of taking your data with you, frankly, I am not a thought leader in any space, and most of my comment history are stray tidbits across multiple subreddits. Certainly nothing of any value. The only value I have is being someone who could have eyes on to ads, or interact with an ad, and that can’t happen if I’m not there. And I fully believe that there is more harm to cause by being inactive than in not being there at all. Huffman may have 400 million accounts, but how many of those are actively engaged? What if the number of inactive accounts keep growing?

Let u/spez be CEO of a graveyard of rapidly aging data and ghosted accounts. For those who have contributed, I think the best solution at this time is to get your knowledge archived in a searchable format and then just pick up elsewhere. Yeah, there will be work to re-grow the community, but I have found that folks do migrate to where the activity is. As subreddits go quiet, folks will look for where the action is. It’s what happened with MySpace and Livejournal, LiveJournal and Facebook and Facebook and Twitter. Reddit is no different. Nor is Twitter. People just forget and get complacent. Personally, I like to shake things up anyway. It’s time for change.

Lemmy is a “ground floor” for the next random tidbits of knowledge aggregator. And I don’t mean that as Lemmy is new, but rather it’d the next port-of-call and mature enough to be engaging while not being entrenched in decades’ old procedures.

I’m excited. I logged off Reddit when Christian shuttered Apollo, signed up on Beehaw and never looked back.

Unfortunately, Christian effectively vetoed Apollo for Lemmy, but there is an iOS app in active development: Mlem. The team seems passionate and last I heard there are about 8K testers hammering away at the app. You can get Mlem via TestFlight.

Unfortunately, Christian effectively vetoed Apollo for Reddit, but the Mlem team seem passionate, and there are about 8K testers for the app, which you can get through TestFlight.