Really fascinating how this is happening in coordination all of a sudden. I’m practically certain that this is all coming from a small group of investors (maybe even just a couple) who are trying to influence companies as hard as they can into making everyone to start using it.

Staying quiet because it will make daddy angry to talk about it is still abuse.

Okay, fair point. What I mean is, don’t bring it up unless the toddler starts talking about it again. Stupid of CNN to bring it up again for no reason.

It’s a little stupid to bring this up. You have to treat the Trump administration like toddlers, ie. when they ask for something, you just have to be firm, ignore it, and wait for it to go away. Raising the topic again will just make your toddler throw another tantrum.

I get that he was asked this by a member of the media, but nobody should be talking about this. You just have to change the topic - again, exactly the same way you deal with toddlers.

Really? That’s interesting. But the group membership list must be persisted somewhere, no? Otherwise, you wouldn’t know where to send and receive messages. So where is it persisted then?

And also, how would you add someone to a group? When you add a new user to a group, would he be able to view all previous messages? Is it possible for this to scale to, say, a thousand or a million users?

But they must still have your phone number and associate it with your username. So it would still be easy for a government organization to force Signal to give up the identities of all people who join a group.

The effect is very similar though. Ultimately, lobbying is most beneficial for interests that are entrenched and/or extremely wealthy. The only difference is the way that they approach it. Bribery is a very narrow means to supporting your cause, but lobbying is much more vague and difficult to define.

Wikipedia is quite resilient - you can even put it on a USB drive. As long as you have a free operating system, there will always be ways to access it.

Agreed. People just think the first tool that they learned is the easiest to use. I’ve been a longtime Gimp user and find it pretty easy to do what I want.* The few times someone asked me to do something in Photoshop, I was pretty helpless. Of course, I’m a pretty basic user - I wouldn’t dispute that Photoshop is more powerful, but which one is easier to use is very subjective and the vast majority of the time, it just boils down to which one you use more often.

I’ve seen the same with people who grew up on Libreoffice and then started smashing their computer when they were asked to use MSOffice.

To add to subignition’s point, there is a value in learning useful software. More complicated software means that there is a learning curve - so while you are less productive while learning how to use it, once you gain more experience, you ultimately become more productive. On the other hand, if you want the software to be useful to everyone regardless of his level of experience, you ultimately have to eliminate more complex functionality that makes the software more useful.

Software is increasingly being distilled down to more and more basic elements, and ultimately, I think that means that people are able to get less done with them these days. This is just my opinion, but in general I have seen computer literacy dropping and people’s productivity likewise decreasing, at least from what I’ve observed from the 1990s up until today. Especially at work, the Linux users that I see are much more knowledgeable and productive than Apple users.

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.

Debatable, in my opinion. There were lots of other companies trying to build personal computers back in those times (IBM being the most prominent). If Microsoft had never existed (or gone about things in a different way), things would have been different, no doubt, but they would still be very important and popular devices. The business-use aspect alone had a great draw and from there, I suspect that adoption at homes, schools, etc. would still follow in a very strong way.

Whatever. The next generation will have to learn to trust whether the material is true or not by using sources like Wikipedia or books by well-regarded authors.

The other thing that he doesn’t understand (and most “AI” advocates don’t either) is that LLMs have nothing to do with facts or information. They’re just probabilistic models that pick the next word(s) based on context. Anyone trying to address the facts and information produced by these models is completely missing the point.

Ubuntu is doing stupid things with packages, replacing them with their proprietary packaging system (called Snap). It has been controversial, the way that they are pushing it, especially since the Snap server is proprietary and non-open source.

A lot of people won’t consider using Ubuntu at all for this reason alone, and it makes sense - when you consider that there are so many other distros to choose from these days, Ubuntu just doesn’t really provide a whole lot of added value anymore.

I’ve seen even worse! Sticky headers with sticky sidebars on both sides. Only about 10-15% of the viewport was left for content. And this is for documentation, so you can only read about 100-200 words at once.

Why even bother having a webpage at that point. Just make the whole thing a non-interactive .png file.

Sticky headers. Unbearably distracting.

Also, wasted space and a lack of information density.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: presidential systems suck. I’m not an expert on Polish politics, but it seems at the very least like the Poles were given a good choice of a candidate. Still, having too many people voting for a single candidate for a single office repeatedly leads to bad outcomes. France, Turkiye, USA - now we can add Poland to the list too.

Abolish presidencies! Embrace parliamentary systems!

And this is why platforms that only grow for the sake of growing is a bad thing. In order to grow unbounded, you have to cater for the kinds of users that you described - no self-respect and no awareness of the platform that they’re using. The kinds of people that will happily let themselves be abused by technocrats like Mark Zuckerberg or whatever Reddit’s CEO is.

Is that the kind of average user that we want on Lemmy? Hell no! If that means that we can never have more than 1 million monthly users, then so be it. Quality over quantity. Reddit has plenty of quantity, but garbage-tier quality.

B-b-b-but my convenience!!!

On the other hand, there are lots of bots scraping Wikipedia even though it’s easy to download the entire website as a single archive.

So they’re not really that smart…

I wasn’t aware of that, but it’s crazy. Thanks for sharing it. The sad truth is that there are probably lots of other standards that didn’t make it into browsers either because Google refused to adopt them in Chrome (JPEG2000 for example, but that’s a complicated ). Google had way too much influence over web standards because they had total control of the web browser.

Also, I’m not going to argue that things aren’t better for developers today than they were before. Sure, web development is much easier these days. But at the same time, I think web applications are way too overengineered. There are lots of things that could be done in simpler ways - for example, why is it necessary to restyle scrollbars, or reimplement standard components like drop-down menus with reimplementations written entirely in Javascript? Things like this are just stupid and having to drop support for trivial things like this in the name of making browsers simpler is well worth it in my opinion.