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.

That’s now what I remember, though. I remember the Dems barely even trying to get universal healthcare. They quickly threw in the towel, because (in my opinion) they wanted to appease their funders.

The passing of the ACA is something I see as a massive failure. How can we not? There was a chance to push for a real solution, universal healthcare, to get the private companies out of healthcare, and the DNC didn’t even try to make it happen.

Obama caving on universal healthcare was a warning sign of the kind of weak sauce that we’re seeing from many Washington Democrats this year, people who simply don’t believe in supporting the average American. If you didn’t see that at the time, I don’t blame you. Many people were fooled. By now, though, it should be apparent to all.

You want to argue that the ACA itself is good, but that’s a meaningless statement. Good compared to what? Meh. Putting a bandaid on a failing system that is now failing worse than it was a decade ago is better than nothing, sure, but it’s not particularly admirable.

I’m not the previous commenter, but in answer to your question, would I rather the ACA not exist? Of course I would! Anyone with half a brain who cares abut human beings around them would. Give us universal healthcare already. To hell with the ACA. Don’t give us broken systems that private companies will game to get rich while depriving our loved ones of live-saving care. We’ve had enough of that already… But many Americans are blindly patriotic, honestly believe that America is the greatest country in the world in every way, and can’t realize how much better life is in other places that actually have half-decent healthcare. So we’ll see if things ever take a change for the better.

God bless DCVS.

That’s where the mini split unit goes, lol. See the vent above it? For the pipes and wires.