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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • In my family, everyone else has an iPhone and I have Samsung S23. So I can maybe give both perspectives. If you just want a phone to be a phone, it’s hard to go wrong with an iPhone. It’s always the best default choice. That being said, I personally can’t go back to an iPhone. Lots of people recommend Google devices because of the “stock” Android experience but I greatly prefer the interface, integration, and customization of Samsung devices.

    Anyway, in no particular order why I like Android/Samsung:

    1. The ability to just copy movie and TV shows files onto the device and play them with VLC. This is a must for me for travel. iOS is still a pain in the ass for this.
    2. In screen finger-print reader and face unlock (both are useful)
    3. Ability to cast a Dex desktop to my TV with one click for showing off content
    4. Customized gesture navigation (swipe up middle - home, swipe up right - back, swipe up left - apps) – full screen is available no button bar
    5. THE BACK BUTTON – every time I use an iPhone I hate hate hate the lack of a back button
    6. Browsers with ad block
    7. Customized YouTube with ad blocking (revanced)
    8. Customized notification icon bar – hide icons that are always on (bluetooth, etc), battery percentage no icon.
    9. Separate profile for Work and Personal – my employer has control only of the work profile and can’t remote wipe my entire phone.
    10. Custom home screen apps (I use Nova 7)
    11. USB-C – one single charger for all my devices (phone, laptop, tablet, buds, etc).
    12. Ability to wirelessly charge my watch and my ear buds using the back of the phone (this is great for travel)
    13. Open source console emulators

    I can probably think of more but that’s a good start.




  • Honestly I think the idea of hundreds of tiny instances of Mastodon or Lemmy is not the way the fediverse should work. It probably won’t work that way because it doesn’t scale well. However, having a half-dozen or so large instances would give you almost the entire benefit without as many of the issues. Would Reddit be having a meltdown right now if there was even just one other instance of Reddit everyone could move to?

    I think federation and centralization is the key to success.




  • The problem is the government has been protecting/supporting one group for a long time to the point that everything is now “too big to fail”. Government continue to create investment materials that can’t fail – and anything that can’t fail will create a bubble and destroy everything else. That investment in Canada was housing. Now it’s like over half our GDP is housing investment. And why invest in anything else? Nothing else is as risk free.

    I feel like the collapse is never going to come.



  • The destruction of the web… As if the web was social medias

    Social media is just as part of the web as anything. Trying to carve out some exception for Facebook because you don’t like them is not a logical argument. What about Wikipedia? Reddit? Lemmy? Digg? Google?

    Go check how much time people spend on each item on their feed on Facebook and how much time they spend on average on a web page vs just on Facebook every day and tell me again how Facebook is bringing traffic to traditional media!

    Please provide the receipts, then.

    If people have to pay for links, how is that going to provide more traffic to traditional media? Isn’t that the whole point of links… to provide traffic.

    Facebook thinks people will spend just as much time on Facebook without news links. This whole law is pointless. It’s trying to create a market for “links” that doesn’t exist. Again, if media companies don’t want to provide summaries and images to Facebook they can do that. Instead, all the major news papers in Canada put tags specifically for Facebook to use with their content. They want those links. So makes it valuable to them, not the other way around.

    If all you just want to take money from Facebook and give it Canadian media companies, why not just make a law that does that.


  • "Is Lemmy also morally responsible to pay media companies because there is a link to this article with a summary? " If it becomes profitable for the instance’s owner then yes.

    You’re arguing for the destruction of the web at this point. Freely linking to content is the backbone of the whole thing.

    It doesn’t because without social media you would still need to check articles on their website instead of just scanning a summary and some pictures in 5 seconds.

    You’re basically saying that actual journalism itself has no value – if a 2 line summary and single picture is the entire value to someone then why is anyone paying for this? An AI can make that for free. I could be a journalist if all the value is a summary and picture. You’re making such a twisted argument with this whole idea that people just read the summary, never click the article, and somehow somebody needs to make money from the article that nobody reads. Media companies provide the summary and pictures to Facebook so that they’ll click on the article in the first place.


  • So Meta would pay for the service media companies provide then, glad we agree, don’t know why you’re arguing then.

    Media companies should pay Meta for the service they provide. It’s literally advertising. Media companies post this material themselves. But if media companies are providing a service that’s worth paying for then they should simply withhold that service until Meta pays. That’s how the free market works. Tim Hortons doesn’t give out free donuts and then go to the government and force you to pay for them if you take one. No, you just buy the damn donut if it’s worth buying.

    The government is forcing the arrangement, the companies decided to just pull out if they had to pay their fair share.

    If Meta benefited from this arrangement they’d pay. Is Lemmy also morally responsible to pay media companies because there is a link to this article with a summary?

    Media companies lost traffic because of social media but they bring traffic to social media.

    Media companies lost traffic because the Internet invalidates their business model. Linking is the only thing they have left – they should be thankful for it.

    You realise you’re defending companies that together make trillions yet pay next to nothing in taxes in their own country (and pay nothing in Canada)?

    Just because someone is an asshole doesn’t mean they’re entitled to less justice. If something is wrong, it’s wrong for everyone.


  • My employer pays taxes and I profit from it.

    That’s not what I mean and you know it. Your employer pays you directly for your services because it’s a benefit to them. Which is basically how all commerce works.

    You think an arrangement could be made by individual news agencies where the freaking government couldn’t?

    No. I think the government has to force this business arrangement because it’s completely backwards. Media companies benefit from linking (they’d literally have no traffic if they didn’t) and they’re trying to extract some value where none exists.

    News agencies don’t profit because people don’t click

    And stores won’t profit if people don’t buy stuff. And streaming services don’t profit if nobody subscribes. That’s life. If, as a media company, you’ve giving up all your value by providing summaries and images then that’s your problem. If Tim Hortons can’t sell any donuts because they give out a free Timbit and a shot of coffee, it is not for the government to fix that. They should just stop doing it.


  • I absolute hated learning cursive in school and I never write cursive now. My son has even more fine motor-control issues than I do and I’m glad he didn’t have to deal with this as well.

    “The computer will not take that over.”

    The 1980’s want their opinions back.

    I actually don’t disagree with the idea that some of the fundamentals that have been taught for decades were and are the right way to teach. We don’t always need new ways to learn reading, writing, math, etc – the old ways are tried and tested. But introducing something like this, which basically completely unnecessary in modern times, based on some unresearched benefits is no better.



  • Does your employer pay you by paying taxes and then government distributes them to you? If there was a real business here, then an arrangement would be made between Facebook and these news organizations. Facebook wouldn’t want to lose out on the profit so they’d pay news agencies for the content. But the truth this, the news agencies are profiting far more than Facebook is from this arrangement. They literally need the government to step in because there is no actual business here.

    The news agencies can absolutely pull out of Facebook. They can opt out of summaries and photos. But they don’t.



  • I’m going to keep with the old-school internet dweller opinion on this law.

    And sure, hosting links to those news stories is mutually beneficial, except that almost no one clicks the links. The headline, teaser and photo are scraped and displayed on the third party app, and that’s all anyone cares to look at. We’re all to blame for not clicking, but those same tech companies are especially to blame for fostering this culture of five-second attention spans

    News organizations have all the control in how their links are displayed. They can opt out of the teaser and photo, etc. They don’t because nobody would click on the link if there wasn’t a photo and teaser. Nobody would read the article at all now if there wasn’t some way to find them – this is a service provided to them. It’s like charging news stands for people reading the headlines as they walk by!

    Hating Facebook is one thing but siding with the corporate media monopoly that is using regulatory capture to keep their failing businesses afloat is not the solution.

    The only reason foreign corporations are extracting the most profit from journalism is that the price of journalism is so low that the only way anyone can make money is aggregating it together by the millions. Why should I pay for some random person’s opinion when I can just read your opinion for free. I can get real time video of situations from hundreds of people all at the same time. The market has fundamentally changed and it true Canadian tradition, a small monopoly of Canadian corporations have lobbied the government to keep them alive for another quarter. I’m not saying journalism is dead but, in the past, it was mostly profitable because of the monopoly of attention – if you wanted to the read the news, you had maybe 2 local choices that got delivered to you in the morning. Now you’re one click away from everything everywhere.