• 65 Posts
  • 595 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 10th, 2024

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  • It’s about money, specifically with a near-term “exit strategy” for investors.

    It lets them push the company into choices that will pump up the stock price so that early shareholders can sell their stock and walk away with profits… without any concern over how those choices will impact the company, its employees, its customers, or the new shareholders in the long term.

    I won’t shed a tear for Discord, though. They are a parasitic corporation that extracts profit from the world’s online communities by using the network effect to lock our communications and collected knowledge behind their terms of service. No company should have control over so much of humanity’s cultural development and history.











  • I’m tired of people saying “technology” when they mean an application of a narrow subfield of technology. Even worse is when they’re not even talking about the tech at all, but instead the practices, leadership, or stock market performance of some corporation that happens to apply some technology in the course of its business.

    I do share the sentiment in this article, though. There’s way too much stuff that we don’t need, often making our lives worse, being pushed at us in order to extract wealth or power.


  • I think it’d be great to live in a world where this technology required warrants, transparency, and other oversight from the start.

    Me too.

    It boils down to the fact that this technology is widespread, and will continue to be widespread regardless of my actions

    That same reasoning has been used innumerable times throughout history. I suppose each of us must decide whether we think it holds water. It reminds me of an old adage: No single drop believes it is responsible for the flood.

    Predator does way more than just ALPR.

    I know. I looked it up. I mentioned the name not because I think it represents what it does, but rather to point out that it will affect how people feel about you and your work, even if in subtle, imperceptible ways. It’s up to you to decide whether you’re comfortable with that.


  • I don’t have a specific suggestion, but here is what comes to mind:

    • Violation of human rights and civil liberties in order to gain power over others is always justified with noble-sounding excuses like protecting people and property. The reality does not match the claim.
    • Once violated, privacy of information is almost impossible to restore.
    • Anything that can be abused to someone’s gain will be abused eventually, if not immediately.
    • Relying on a benevolent gatekeeper (even yourself) to prevent abuse of your tech will eventually fail.
    • The name V0LT Predator evokes the feeling that it’s something the world needs less of, not more.

    Whenever I find myself on a fine line like the one you’re trying to walk, I consider whether I’ll look back on my life and be proud of what projects/causes/changes to the world that I advanced with the time and talents that I have.


  • Sony used to make compact variants of their flagship Xperia phones. Good specs. Good battery life. Good camera. Good display. Good sound. Good reception. Headphone jack. SD card slot. Unlockable bootloader, so they could be de-googled.

    Sadly, the “compact” models grew slightly larger with each model year, and even a not-so-compact one hasn’t been released in a while.


  • Look for an instance with these qualities:

    • Does not use Cloudflare or any other large content delivery network. Instances that use thse allow the CDN to monitor everything your read and write on Lemmy, which can reveal a lot about you even if you haven’t used your real name. Cloudflare can then correlate that information with your other browsing habits, and possibly your real identity, because they operate as a middleman for a huge number of popular web sites.
    • Maintains a sizable local image cache. Images served from other instances instead of your local one can be abused by remote parties to track what is viewed on Lemmy with your IP address (and sometimes your browser signature). Alternatively, you could block off-site images using a browser extension, but that would mean not getting to see as many pictures.


  • But without it, your post very much was just another person using the word as though it was fine to say and weird that people wouldn’t say it.

    No, that’s something that came entirely from you. My comment merely pointed out a failure of the article to say what it was talking about.

    It’s important to be careful when communicating with others about issues that feed strong emotions in us. It’s all too easy to project meaning that isn’t there, and mistakenly vilify someone based on our own biases.

    And with it being at -5 when I posted, I wasn’t the only one that read it that way.

    Yes, and at least some of that was surely due to the influence of your comment.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwagon_effect

    You even felt you needed to correct it after I left.

    That’s faulty reasoning. What I added was not a correction, but an explicit statement of what should have been obvious to a reader who wasn’t looking for a quarrel. In other words, I went the extra mile to do the reader’s job for them. My addendum doesn’t imply fault in the original.

    I did this only because I’m familiar with the way misguided replies can lead to toxic snowballs on web forums, and I noticed that your comment had the potential to start one.

    In retrospect, with the added context, I can see what you originally meant.

    A simple “I’m sorry for mistakenly chiding you” would have sufficed here. Good day.


  • As my post would have referred to your first sentence absent the second.

    There was never a point where my comment contained the first sentence absent the second.

    And you’ll notice everyone read your post the way I did before you edited it. When I came along, you had -5.

    Bandwagoning is very common on web forums. People are easily influenced by the first reply they see, and will often click a vote button before thinking about what was actually written.

    The paragraph I added was to try to guide people away from that bad habit once the bandwagoning had already started. It does not imply fault in my original comment.

    When I am the listener or reader, any time my first impression of a comment is negative, I consider it my responsibility to stop and consider other meanings before crying foul. That’s the only way we can avoid miscommunication, after all, since it’s not possible for a speaker or author to predict every potential misinterpretation, and the burden of avoiding it should not be entirely on them. I wish more people would do the same.