It is a small performance tweak if done once, right? But let’s suppose people worried about refactoring here would have checked to see what areas of their code are seeing heavy use.

Correlation is not causation. This is Statistics 101… I can point to other things that are correlated with the rise in the far right. For example, centralization, the increase in monopolies, the number of years since World War II, the average temperature of the earth, the number of years into the new millennium.

Anyway, when I read your comment on the whole what I actually see is that your concerned that social media is too centralized and therefore ripe for abuse. That’s vastly different from saying that social media itself is inherently going to be abused.

No, it’s not normal. Almost no internet companies around the world try to do anything similar to what Meta did and does. Even if you focus on social media companies, I believe that only a small minority try to do that kind of thing.

For example, here we are on social media. Do you see any targeted advertising? Is it being done by the Lemmy instance? And how many instances are there? Then we could look at Mastodon, or discussion forums, or comment boards, or you name it. Of course you would expect some targeted advertising, like you might find computer advertisements if you’re on a computer tech forum, but that’s different from targeting users who are in a weak state of mind, precisely because it’s targeting their overtly expressed general interests and not their temporary vulnerabilities.

Finally, I think you should go back and read the article. You ranted about companies trying to shove things down your throats, but the article was about how to misuse targeted advertising.

AI should scare you. People will just dump everything on AI and then let it fuck over your life. What happens if AI flags you as a terrorist and your drivers license is suspended, or your health care is cancelled? What happens if AI says you’re fraudulently collecting social security? There’s nobody to blame, because they’ll just blame the computer.

No. Kindness is often a tool for conservatives to maintain power. It’s important, but integrity is more important.

Not really though. Starlinkn doesn’t scale up well. And it only makes sense in niche circumstances. And it is vulnerable. You could easily imagine a future president just taking it over for national safety reasons.

Then they will offer shit support to avoid doing so. Simpler and safer to just make unlocking legit from the start.

Of course it would not.

Yes. They need to move quickly. Public opinion is already shifting against Trump and Musk, and right now they are vulnerable.

I don’t think they are trying to sabotage their own products. It really is that they’re not smart enough to see where is the value is. And this is kind of understandable, right? The underlying software has been copied already. It’s out there. If that company has value it’s only the user base. But that puts management in the strange situation where everything they are doing to make money is making their own product worse. And they kind of know it, right? But they can’t admit it. They can’t think about it clear. Their own mental stability relies on ignoring the obvious truths that they see and read every day.

“risking”? No no no. “promising”

My friend, FOSS has been readily available for more than a decade. Whether it’s LibreOffice or the GIMP or VLC or whatever, these are very old pieces of software.

It’s not taking off now. It already did. But now you personally are noticing. :-)

Zotero is the tool you want. It works perfectly.

The formatting… The formatting that you can easily modify. Sigh. It takes two minutes, my friend.

Anyway, you do you.

I’ve never had compatibility issues. Of course many people have, but a lot of the time people are blindly speculating about potential badness.

Of course there are alternatives to Excel. Anyone pretending otherwise has only worked at a few places and is generalizing with great but mistaken confidence.

But even if there weren’t, think about those companies living on the edge of one software breakdown. There’s a word for that: brittle. Meh, YOLO.

Doesn’t that depend on the forums, though? For many organizations, those sites fit the needs perfectly fine. If you don’t care about archiving and you would not be totally screwed if the forum disappeared tomorrow, you’re going to opt for something simple like that.

Right. It’s just that Mozilla gets a lot of money from … checks notes … facepalm. So they’re worse!

I have used it on old underpowered computers happily for years. There’s just no need for anything with high specs.