Probably lukewarm take: Social media shouldn’t be a utility because it provides no social value or improvement of quality of life in the same way other genuine public utilities like electricity, water, sewer services, or general access to the internet, might. It’s also putting the government in a position in which it functionally would have to provide a platform for everyone equally, Neo-Nazis, climate deniers, anti-vaccers, and every other person with “insert terrible belief here” included.
Ultimately, saying social media should be a public utility is like saying casinos and strip clubs should be public utilities. Just because it’s fun to use doesn’t mean it’s good for society or come anywhere close to meeting the definition for the level of necessity typically attached to something as a public utility.
When businesses ask you to contact their help-desk via WhatsApp, it’s a utility. When people call and message friends, family, and colleagues almost exclusively on WhatsApp or Messenger, it’s a utility.
Except…no, it’s not. That’s an extremely naive understanding of what a “public utility” is. A public utility is not defined by how many people use something. Public utilities are essential services that typically operate on economies of scale. That is to say services without realistic replacement and which have large upfront creation and maintenance costs and which only make sense to provide access to a large number of people. You can’t replace electricity with some alternate source of power. It’s electricity. Same for water. They’re fundamental services that are required for other services to exist. Without electricity you don’t have phone or internet. Without water you can’t have sewer systems or indoor plumbing.
WhatsApp, by comparison, is trivially easy to replace. A business chooses to use WhatsApp for customer service. They could just as easily setup a Discord server or just establish an 800 number for you to call. They have immediate drop-in replacements. Arguing otherwise is sort of like arguing that Coke should be considered a public utility because a business serves Coke products. They don’t have to serve Coke. They could serve Pepsi. Or anything else.
Also, your reasoning is kind of skewed, because in order to even use something like WhatsApp, you need other, already existing services. Namely internet access. It makes literally no sense to say “WhatsApp should be a utility” without first arguing that “internet access for all individuals at a national level should be a public utility.” Which I would personally argue is something that does qualify as a utility, far more than any specific social media services or app, and the fact that it isn’t is a huge problem for the United States.
Godwin’s Law People preaching [insert terrible belief] on a government platform would be removed and charged for hate speech just as much as they would be if preaching these things in public spaces.
Oh, okay, “Godwin’s Law” is it? Cool. Here’s an actual law. Like a literal piece of legislation that exists: it’s called the First Amendment. I don’t know if you’re just speaking from a non-American context, or just don’t know how “freedom of speech” is codified into law in the United States. Maybe you’re a kid or something and just haven’t learned that in school yet. But freedom of speech in public places is universally protected under the constitution. Like, there are still public Klan rallies in certain parts of the country. This is what allows those to happen. If the United States government maintained its own social media service, it would functionally not have the power to moderate any content that was not explicitly illegal. Bigotry and hate speech are not illegal under the constitution.
They pretty much all say that South Africa presented a case in the Hague that argued that Israel has violated the 2nd article of the international genocide conventions and that Israel has acted with genocidal intent towards the people of Palestine. Or is there something else of note that isn’t being discussed? Like did a horse briefly get loose in the court and they had to stop proceedings to try and catch it?
I’ve spent some time searching this question, but I have yet to find a satisfying answer. The majority of answers that I have seen state something along the lines of the following:...
And like most things related to Linux on the internet, the consensus is generally incorrect. For a typical home user who isn’t opening ports or taking a development laptop to places with unsecure wifi networks, you don’t really need a firewall. It’s completely superflous. Anything you do to your PC that causes you genuine discomfort will more than likely be your own fault rather than an explicit vulnerability. And if you’re opening ports on your home network to do self-hosting, you’re already inviting trouble and a firewall is, in that scenario, a bandaid on a sucking chest wound you self-inflicted.
We’re also to some extent innately combative creatures. People will say “Oh, I showed people the facts and they still didn’t change their mind. They’re just idiots stuck in their ways.” Okay, cool. When you tried to present these facts, did you do it in such a way as to treat them courteously or as an equal, or did you do it in such a way that you got to feel like you were dunking on them rhetorically? Because it’s not as simple as presenting someone with facts. It’s doing so in a way that doesn’t make it feel like you’re trying to establish some kind of superiority over them. Because then they’re not presenting facts to you, they’re just attacking you and your position. And these are very different things, conceptually and emotionally.
There’s a number of existing forks already. Most of them for porn. For the ones that have integrated with the last Tachiyomi update that removed native extensions, what you’ll be able to do is set a repository as an upstream apk source for whatever extensions you want. There’s plenty of those already on github. You just have to look for them.
There’s code you can download from github that would let you control your Roku device from terminal on a PC. I’ve used it to facilitate the design of my own Roku GUI applications. I think there might also be a TUI you can install. A lot of this is going to be easier on Linux, if that’s something you’re familiar with.
In America, socialism is something you only get once you become a powerful enough capitalist enterprise. The state produces the means of production and then just hands it over to you while you collect profits. Another great example of this is the thousands of miles of dark fiber optic cable buried in the US that ISPs refuse to connect at the “last mile.” Why spend a bunch of money giving everybody fiber when they’re already paying you a kidney every month for shitty rural DSL?
I always knew him as the guy that copied reddit and tvtropes forum posts and put them into youtube videos while providing no credit to the original people that came up with them.
Old internet to me is straight up pointlesswasteoftime.com, which eventually got absorbed by Cracked like a cheap suppository after David Wong (aka mediocre comedy writer Jason Pargin) sold out. That was in 2007. And now Cracked is functionally a content graveyard.
It got bought out by the company that owns KnowYourMeme, ebaumsworld, and the “I can has cheezeburger?” website in 2019. That’s pretty much all you need to know.
And this is why I don’t contribute. Or at least I’ll ask a question about whether or not something would be a desired feature and if I don’t get a clear yes or no by someone who can actually approve a PR, I. ain’t. coding. shit.
The sad thing is that a Cyberpunk dystopia is nominally interesting. Violent, terrible, and impoverished, yes, but also fastpaced and exciting. Our world is dull, programmatic, largely predictable, and extremely boring unless you have disposable income. We all have cellphones, yes, but that doesn’t make it cyberpunk.
This is true of any work of fiction. People in works of fiction - at least works of sci-fi or fantasy adventure - are typically more risk taking because that’s interesting to a reader/audience and the author knows this.
Lemmy: Corporations are terrible. None of them have your back. They’re all just out to make money and the only reason they pay their employees is because slavery is illegal.
Valve has been compared to Lord of the Flies because of its corporate structure by multiple people who worked for them. The company has an internal ranking system that determines compensation. It’s also one of the least diverse workplaces in its industry, being overwhelmingly white and male.
So, while I’m glad that Gabe was nice to one of his direct reports, the reality is that the president of the company being nice to one specific person doesn’t make the company good or ethically ran.
Nitter is shutting down (github.com)
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/11136426...
Title (hexbear.net)
When do I actually need a firewall?
I’ve spent some time searching this question, but I have yet to find a satisfying answer. The majority of answers that I have seen state something along the lines of the following:...
My wife every two weeks: (slrpnk.net)
Yeah, well... (lemmy.world)
It's joever. Tachiyomi will no longer be actively developed. (tachiyomi.org)
project will no longer be under active development due to recent events involving Kakao Entertainment Corp’s threats to both myself and others...
roku remote app showing ads now (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
My dog tore up the remote so we were forced to use the roku app to control the tv....
Some of you owe me an apology (i.imgur.com)
Get it together (lemmy.ml)
Lemmy about to implode. (lemmy.world)
Glory to our new overlords! (lemmy.ml)
I was able to learn React though (lemmy.world)
Cringe (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
Phantom of the Opera (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
One does not simply (programming.dev)
Dall E created that image.
I will rue the day this inevitably happens. (lemmy.world)