“free” is the sound that natural gas makes as it is released from its underground prison …

also propaganda is just political ads, and the way companies make money on the internet is by showing ads …

well i guess we’d have a better time thinking about non-profitable alternatives, then.

depends on who you’re talking to, and in which rooms.

yeah the commercialization of the internet is the problem, 100%. if it were hobby projects, it wouldn’t suck so hard.

This is a good point. It’s like asking the question: “What is more important in politics? People, or ideas?”

People respond very differently to that. To some it’s people, and to some it’s ideas. That is why you have Xitter-like microblogging which is focused around people, and reddit-like communities which are focused around topics/ideas.

lemmy does have problems though. Lots of emotional, judgemental and brigading content still. But it’s less here than elsewhere, probably.

The reason why it brings out the worst in people is because it has open borders. You can shit into the network and move on. If you were forced to stay and live with your shit, you’d shit less into the public domain. That means small networks, harder to move to other/new networks, …

if we’re immune to the problems, it would be because people here use critical thinking skills instead of swallowing large amounts of contents. that’s the sole reason, it has nothing to do with the network’s size.

first of all, it’s a broad overgeneralization to assume that all social media is created with the intention to manipulate people. there was honest people running social media, but it’s long past. (in the corporate domain)

• social media can be useful if it presents non-emotional, non-brigading content. rational discourse is one of the valuable options possible. throwing away the whole internet because Xitter sucks is throwing away the baby with the bathwater.

• but yes, social media is the new Volksempfänger and manipulates people (social engineering)

Of course intel will collapse within the next 10 years.

They have focused exclusively on high-end, very expensive processors in the past. Now that moore’s law is no longer true, that doesn’t work anymore, because ARM chips are catching up in performance, at 1/10 of the price.

Sadly, this kind of trash is far more important to the average person than the things that matter (and this is hardly just an American phenomenon). It’s mainly because the things that actually matter are much more complicated, and require effort to understand

bike-shedding

From bikeshed +‎ -ing. The term was coined as a metaphor to illuminate Parkinson’s Law of Triviality. Parkinson observed that a committee whose job is to approve plans for a nuclear power plant may spend the majority of its time on relatively unimportant but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bikeshed, while neglecting the design of the power plant itself, which is far more important but also far more difficult to criticize constructively. It was popularized in the Berkeley Software Distribution community by Poul-Henning Kamp[1] and has spread from there to the software industry at large.