Overly-teleological modernist framing has hopelessly fucked up tech discourse. Too much declaring things the future and hoping people will just believe you.
If MS didn’t do it, someone else would have and it would have become the trend anyway. The problem isn’t the particular sins of a specific company (though to be clear, MS is heinous), the problem is the profit motive.
The issue is partly that, over time, private entities are going to price gouge or take similar measures (see: “enshittification”) in order to keep growing as profit falls over time. That’s just how the profit motive works, it eventually optimizes everything for profit, not just what you are comfortable with having turned into a vehicle aimed solely at making money.
So yes, this and many other important things should be treated as public goods.
Sorry, are we talking about Chomsky suggesting that Ukrainians being left alive would be a good thing? Because that got him in some headlines but it’s still not remotely what he is best known for.
I think part of it is that if someone comes here looking for a Reddit substitute, they will be disappointed, but if they come here looking for something extremely distinct from Reddit, they will also be disappointed. A lot of fediverse stuff is basically an inferior Reddit clone and that problem was compounded by the huge wave of Ledditors basically hijacking the culture of multiple instances to just exercise their Reddit habits, making the comparison even more obvious and poor.
Lemmy needs to eat populations that aren’t too big in order to metabolize them properly. Anything beyond that is going to get ejected along with some of what it could have handled if it was just that, and this will remain how it works until Lemmy figures out how to push people much harder to engage differently with it than with Reddit.
I honestly thought OP was an edit to make the paw pads glow, but I see from your video that it’s because that’s the contact area. Thanks for sharing it!
This is functionally a case of affirming the consequent or something similar. “Ball is life” is really expressing something more like “there is no life worth living except one involving ball”, so “fuck it we ball” is needed to keep living a worthwhile life if you assume that, but it’s not really an endorsement of living itself.
It’s like how, if I believe “drinking is the only reason I live”, saying “I want to drink” only endorses “I want to live” incidentally at best, rather than the two statements being equivalent. It’s like, in a mundane context, saying you want to eat. Eating is a condition of living, but the desire to eat is not identical to the desire to live, and a suicidal person can still be hungry and eat not to live but merely to relieve the pain of hunger. So too can the alcoholic lifestylist drink and the baller ball for the sake of their enjoyment of the respective activity (or aversion to how they feel without it) without there being a direct desire to live as such.