• 0 Posts
  • 28 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

help-circle



  • I had an idea a while ago on how you could lightly regulate social media platforms.

    Require them to:

    • Group users into cohorts of a size greater than X. ie, individual level targeting isn’t allowed. The higher this number the better.
    • make available to users the cohort they are in
    • publish openly every single cohort and their size
    • make it possible to view feeds as if you were in a specific cohort.

    Will this stop them funnelling customers into rabbit holes? No, probably not.

    But it would make “targeted indoctrination” harder as they would have to try and indoctrinate multiple people at once. And it would make it more transparent just how many people are being fed propaganda or whatever you want to call it.





  • I don’t believe Mozilla doesn’t have the best interests of the browser at heart, I believe that they do think their browser is the their number one product.

    But that’s the problem. It’s free software, going up against a juggernaut whose browser is just another side project to drive engagement with their core product.

    A juggernaut who just so happens to be one of Mozilla’s primary source of income. All it will take is a little bit of legislation somewhere in the world to make that deal less attractive and Mozilla could be dead in the water. And it will take all of those forks with it, paving the way for Google to become the true web Hegemony.

    Mozilla needs to diversify to ensure they can continue to provide stewardship to the browser.

    But trying to make money in 2025 just seems to summon the enshittification brigade.

    Free software is not free. Someone has to make it.


  • I have doubts.

    I live in a city where water leaks contribute to something like 40% of supplied potable water ‘consumption’.

    Why so much? Because the pipes are old, shit, and underground. it costs a load of money to dig that shit up.

    A $5 (or even $500) brass fitting that will last 50+ years is nothing when you’ve spent $1000s doing traffic management, digging up a road, replacing some pipe, and putting it all back again.

    What are you going to trust? A $5 lump of solid of brass, or a $0.3 lump of plastic, made by squeezing 0.2mm layers of plastic string on top of each other, using a system whose bonding strength can be drastically affected by ambient and absorbed humidity, temperature, speed, airflow, and a whole load of other variables.







  • Because their jobs financing is mostly perception based.

    Crime can be at an all time low, but all it takes is a politician to rile up the population about murderers and law enforcement and incarceration will end up getting more money.

    Be seen as being ineffective, soft or incompetent, especially by those holding the purse strings, and people lose jobs to those who will toe the line.

    This is a message to the wealthy “look how seriously we take serving you”