Rottcodd

As I just noted on another response, mostly it was that I came up with a delicious turn of phrase and couldn’t not post it. And yes, while broadly I think that Google deserves every bit of shit that’s thrown their way and more - that they could vanish from the face of the Earth tomorrow and the internet could only benefit - this particular incident really isn’t a good example.

I have to admit that I was so pleased with that turn of phrase when it came to me that I went ahead and posted it in spite of the fact that this specific incident doesn’t appear to be a good example.

It’s really sort of amazing how few years it took to go from “Do no evil” to “Don’t even bother pretending not to.”

Axiomatically, no, since it isn’t even AI in any meaningful sense of the term, so it fails to live up to its hype right out the gate.

So… aren’t these wannabe twitter competitors going about the whole thing bass-ackwards?

I saw a broadly similar article the other day about some sort of shakeup in the Mastodon board of directors.

It’s as if they think the way do do an internet startup is to first appoint a board of directors and hire a raft of executives, then… um… you know… um… do some business… kinda… stuff…

Nicely clarified.

Yes - the way I said it leaves the possibility that they have to pay at minimum their profit, and no - that should not be the case. They should have to pay at minimum their total revenue.

This shouldn’t be an exception - it should be the rule.

At the very least, companies should be fined every single cent that they made off of something criminal, and really, they should be fined much more than they made.

If they’re fined less than they made off of it, it’s not even really a fine. It’s just the government taking a cut of the action.

I don’t think it’s worse, but that’s only because, as far as responses from trolls and bad faith actors go, I’d rather get screeds from lunatic extremists than pseudo-leftist establishment dogma boiled down to little pieces of emotive rhetoric that are just mindlessly regurgitated over and over by bots and humans-who-might-as-well-be-bots.

Would you refuse to visit websites that force registration even if the account is free?

I already generally do.

What’s all the fuss about, you don’t care?

I honestly don’t much care, but that’s because western civilization is circling the drain, warped and undermined at every turn by wealthy and powerful psychopaths, and it’s just not worth it to care, since there’s absolutely nothing I can do to stop them

Is advertising a necessary evil in fair trade for content?

Some sort of revenue stream is potentially necessary, but that’s the extent of it. Advertising is just one revenue stream, and even if we limit the choices to that, there are still many different ways it could be implemented.

The specific forms of advertising to which we’re subjected on the internet are very much not necessary. And they don’t exist as they do because the costs of serving content require that much revenue - they exist as they do to pay for corporate bloat - ludicrously expensive real estate and facilities and grotesquely inflated salaries for mostly useless executive shitheads.

Would this limit your visiting of websites to only a narrow few you are willing to trade personal details for?

Again, that’s what I already do, so it would just add more sites to those I won’t visit.

Is this a bad thing for the internet experience as whole, or just another progression of technology?

At this point, the two are almost always one and the same. Internet technology is primarily harnessed to the goal of maximizing income for the well-positioned few, and all other considerations are secondary.

Is this no different from using any other technology platform that’s free (If it’s free, you’re the product)?

This is cynically amusing on Lemmy.

Should website owners just accept a lower revenue model and adapt their business, rather than seeking higher / unfair revenues from privacy invasive practices of the past?

Of course they should, but they won’t, because they’re psychopaths. They’ll never give up any of their grotesque and destructive privilege, even if that means that they ultimately destroy the host on which they’re parasites.

What the fuck are you on about?

It’s not necessarily the case though that fewer crimes are being actually “solved,” in the most precise sense of the term.

It could be that the current heightened interest in police oversight and focus on investigation of (and huge lawsuit payouts as a consequence of) wrongdoing by the police has made it less likely that people will be railroaded/framed for crimes they didn’t actually commit, so the rate at which crimes are marked as solved has declined, even as the rate at which they actually are solved hasn’t.

That’s everything I said, right there. What part of it are you not understanding?

evidence is necessary. otherwise, it’s just speculation

Of course it’s fucking speculation! What the fuck else did you think it was?!

i didn’t expect equivocation

It would be equivocation if there was a disjunct between the intended meaning of what I said at one point and the intended meaning of the same thing at some other point.

But I’ve been entirely consistent in what I’ve said. The disjunct is between what YOU thought I meant and what I actually said, and that’s your fucking problem - not mine.

Eh?

I said that it’s “not necessarily the case that” one thing and “it could be that” something else.

Logic and plausibilty are all that’s necessary.

It struck me after I posted that that modern technology and investigative techniques would also contribute to such a decline.

It’s undoubtedly more difficult to falsely convict someone (whether deliberately or not) in the era of GPS, cell phone records, video surveillance and DNA tests.

It’s not necessarily the case though that fewer crimes are being actually “solved,” in the most precise sense of the term.

It could be that the current heightened interest in police oversight and focus on investigation of (and huge lawsuit payouts as a consequence of) wrongdoing by the police has made it less likely that people will be railroaded/framed for crimes they didn’t actually commit, so the rate at which crimes are marked as solved has declined, even as the rate at which they actually are solved hasn’t.

Well yeah - it’s not an evil product. As an inanimate object, it can’t possess a moral quality.

Moral qualities are only rightly assigned to conscious beings - like, for example, corporate CEOs.

My objection to it is that it seems that its subject and its target audience are essentially the same people.

Or you could just not care so much.

If you post memes that are likely to offend someone somewhere, then there’s a risk that one of those someones is going to be a mod, and they’re going to delete it. And really, that’s just the way it goes.

Certainly you might prefer that they have explicit, precise and closely followed rules so you can accurately predict what they’ll do, but there’s really no requirement that they do so - if they want vague rules arbitrarily enforced, that’s their prerogative.

And really, what are you out if they do delete a post? It’s not like you paid for it or you have some sort of quota you have to meet. You just toss things out into the internet, and some of them float and others sink.

Like many labels people choose to self-apply (including but by no means limited to religious ones), “atheist” has a bit of an image problem, since the people who are most eager to self-apply it, and to broadcast that self-application far and wide, tend to be insecure, over-compensating, self-absorbed, obnoxious assholes.

There are a great many generally kind, decent people who identify as “atheists.” You just don’t generally know that they do, since, being generally kind and decent people, they aren’t crashing around like football hooligans, alternately screeching about their own team and atacking the opposing team.

And that’s the case with pretty much all labels. The problem is almost never with people who self-apply a particular label, but simply with noxious assholes, regardless of the label. It’s generally just our own biases that make it so that we consider the noxious assholes who wear one label to define all who do and the noxious assholes who wear another to be unfortunate exceptions to the rule.

Yeah - that arguably would be cheaper, and it definitely would be better for society as a whole.

That’s entirely irrelevant though, because it’s not going to happen.

The primary reason that decently-paying jobs have become so much less common is that, over the last few decades in particular, the money that would’ve paid decent wages has been diverted to pay truly obscene salaries to a handful of executives.

And the people drawing those obscene salaries, and making general pay decisions for corporations, tend to be, quite seriously, psychopaths.

A person who has morals, principles, integrity and empathy will exercise self-restraint - they’ll have particular choices that they simply will not make.

A person without any of those qualities - a psychopath - will not be constrained. They will be entirely free to choose any course of action that will benefit them in any way, entirely regardless of the consequences to others.

So all other things being more or less equal, paychopaths will have a strategic advantage in competitions for position in hierarchies like corporations or governments.

In a sound society, that advantage will be blunted by the simple fact that people with morals, principles, integrity and empathy find them and their tactics reprehensible. That has historically made them more the exception than the rule.

In the 80s in the US, there was a fundamental change. Society was sold the idea that “greed is good” - that winning is everything and to the victor goes the spoils and watch out for number 1 and so on - essentially psychopathic views were marketed as virtues. Successfully.

And throughout that period, enough psychopaths succeeded that theirs became the dominant viewpoint, particularly in the largest corporations (or the most rapacious, and thus most successful throughout the takeover era of corporate consolidation). And since then they’ve just grown more entrenched and more self-serving, and richer, and more powerful.

Which brings me back to the point - yours is a relatively sound viewpoint, but it’s entirely irrelevant, because the people who control the power by which such a thing might be accomplished are psychopaths, and they are not going to act in a way that might diminish by even a fraction their undeserved and destructive wealth and privilege, even if it’s not only for the good of society as a whole, but then necessarily for their own long-term good. They just aren’t psychologically or morally equipped to make that choice. And they control the power in our society, so nobody else can meaningfully make that choice.

So really, the only remaining option is the same one that eventually befell Sumer and Egypt and Athens and Rome - societal collapse. Just as was the case with them, the upper classes have become too entrenched, too self-serving and too greedy to make the choices that would save their civilization, and nobody else has the power to overcome them. And just as was the case with those civilizations, the common people, between being confused and being self-servingly manipulated and misled, blame subsets of each other instead of the people who really bear the lion’s share of the responsibility for the woes facing their civilization. So just as was the case with their societies, things will just get uglier and uglier until they finally fall apart. Like it or not.

Have a nice day anyway though, because that’s really all you can do. We can’t stop the relentless downhill slide, but we can at least try not to make each other unnecessarily miserable along the way.

It’s something I was never actually conscious of until I stopped and thought about it yesterday because of this thread. I’ve just always moved the scroll wheel in the way that it seems like it should work, and it works the way it seems like it should.

The thing you’re apparently calling “traditional” seems natural to me.

I’ve never really stopped and thought about it before, but as far as I can figure, my brain expects the part of the system that does or would actually touch the surface to drag the screen in a particular direction through the simple workings of physics.

On a touchscreen, it’s simple - it’s my finger actually touching the screen and it drags the screen around exactly as I’d expect.

With a mouse, my finger isn’t the important part because it’s not touching the surface (or more precisely, the mousepad that substitutes for the surface). Rather, my finger is contolling the mouse, and the underside of the mouse is touching the surface. And as far as that goes, the “traditional” way it works is correct - when I move my finger downward on the mouse wheel, the bottom side of the wheel - the part that would actually be touching the surface if it was a purely mechanical system - is moving upward, so would drag the screen upward.

So to me, that’s what’s natural.