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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Social media platforms tend to argue against these rules for profit motivations. So I can see why lemmy wouldn’t be on their side.

    But these kinds of laws can also restrict usage of social media in strange ways. Do you want to post politically in opposition to the ruling party? Hate speech. Do you want to post about your minority’s opposition? Hate speech. You want to post about how the police came and kidnapped your grandma and murdered your dog? Hate speech.

    It’s really hard to implement this type of content law without throwing away good parts.



  • Echo chambers and all, yeah it’s likely TikTok has this issue too. TikTok gives you content you want to see, because you’ll stay around and watch more ads. No surprise here.

    conservative TikTok users tend to stick together. They rarely follow accounts with opposing views or mainstream media accounts. Liberal users, on the other hand, are more likely to follow a mix of accounts, including those they might disagree with.

    That’s weird and somewhat descriptive of my anecdotal experience with many people I know. I wonder why this is.






  • I’m American but live outside the US in a developing country.

    Here, the situation on the roads is wildly unstandardized. Every turn, road sign, curb size, lane width, bridge height, traffic signal duration, etc may or may not be consistent with anything else. Not to mention drivers going the wrong way, motorcycles on the sidewalks, people stopping in the road and more.

    Because of the weirdness drivers know they have to pay attention or else death and injury awaits.

    The fact that the 11’ 8" bridge still takes so many casualties suggests drivers confidently think they can drive all over the USA and the road is engineered to an exacting standard. Except for this one bridge.

    I think it’s actually time for the city to just properly fix this bridge and bring it up to standard.








  • “Ever” is a long time. Human progress seems to come and go based on need and economics. At the moment we seem pretty distracted by local problems and I don’t think any of us will still be around by the time humans kill the Earth, so it doesn’t seem all that pressing.

    But someday the technical issues will be solved and a sustainable habitat will be able to coast through space for however long it takes to travel beyond Mars to somewhere else interesting. When it’s possible, I think some people will do it, perhaps a lot of people.

    It’s a worthy goal. As a human I feel some motivation to ensure the continuation of our species so I would lean towards any efforts that involve sending some backup copies of our DNA to some off-site storage.


  • I remember that IBM was famously missing the trend in the late 80s/90s and couldn’t understand why regular consumers would ever want to buy a PC. It’s why they gave the PC clone market away, never seriously approached their OS/2 thing, and never really marketed directly to anybody except businesses.

    Microsoft really pushed the idea that regular people needed a home PC which laid the foundation for so many people already having the hardware in place to jump on the internet as soon as it became accessible.

    For a brief moment it looked like a toss up between Microsoft IIS webservers serving up .asp files (or coldfusion .cf - RIP) vs Apache pushing CGI but in the end the Linux solution was more baked and flexible when it was time to launch and scale an internet startup in that era.

    Somebody else would have done what Microsoft did for sure, had they not been there, and I suppose we could be paying AT&T for Unix licenses these days too. But yeah, ultimately both Gates and Torvalds were right in terms of operating systems and well timed.




  • Both Torvalds and Gates are nerds… Gates decided to monetize it and Torvalds decided to give it away.

    But without Microsoft’s “PC on every desktop” vision for the '90s, we may not have seen such an increased demand for server infrastructure which is all running the Linux kernel now.

    Arguably Torvalds’ strategy had a greater impact than Gates because now many of us carry his kernel in our pocket. But I think both needed each other to get where we are today.