I had the crappiest of PCs in 2006 or 2007 with 768MBs of RAM running Windows XP. Funnily enough the reason I switched to Chrome back then was the immense RAM usage of Firefox compared to Chrome back then. With the big rebranding an rerelease of Firefox in 2017? 2018? I came back and haven’t looked back since.
I went straight from Mozilla Navigator to Firefox 1.0.
Tabs were such a crazy new thing back then. You would show tabbed browsing to someone (rather than opening new windows) and they thought you were a wizard. IE5 didn’t have tabs, so nerds moved to Mozilla/Firefox. Then IE6 came out but still didn’t have tabs. By the time IE7 came out, I’d had tabbed browsing for 5+ years.
I’m willing to pay for one, maybe two subscriptions, and ain’t nobody got time to dig for which service has what show to find out season 2 is on some other service entirely.
Hell, I even pay for a service that has all the magnet links resolved and ready to stream, no downloading involved. For 30 bucks (a year!) it’s been the most convenient way of enjoying movies & shows.
I was fine with paying for Netflix. Then they started pulling shit off for their own services and I quit when there was nothing but the lame Netflix originals and some old shit I don’t watch anymore. One of the things that put me over the edge was when they would do things like put a sequel up but not the original.
How the fuck do you expect me to just jump into The Two Towers and not expect me to want to watch The Fellowship of the Ring first?! Oh you think I’m going to go buy/rent the first movie 😂 that’s cute.
No, I’ll just go back to pirating. Much more convenient to be able to say, watch an episode of The Office and then switch to a Marvel movie from Disney+ and then a Marvel show from Netflix without paying a dime to 3 different subscriptions and being inconvenienced to have to close and open a whole new fucking app.
Now I just spend money for a VPN each month. Less than what it costs for a single of any of those other subscriptions too and I can choose my quality and version and not worry about it getting removed tomorrow!
How the fuck do you expect me to just jump into The Two Towers and not expect me to want to watch The Fellowship of the Ring first?! Oh you think I’m going to go buy/rent the first movie 😂 that’s cute.
How do people still not grasp that Netflix can’t just buy whatever they want to stream? Licenses are often being held by other services at the time. They also have no control over if a show gets pulled or not. I still see people complaining that Netflix “got rid” of the Office.
Like, I have no love for Netflix or any streaming service at this point, but at least shit on them for things that are actually in their control.
And frankly, this is how HBO, Showtime, Stars, etc have operated like this for decades before Netflix came along. It’s so weird people think “shows/movies being pulled because the license deal expired” is something unique to Netflix.
That rhetorical question goes out to those who hold the rights. I know Netflix had no control. I just find it weird that studios/etc. felt that was a wise decision.
Music industry seemed to figure it out pretty well. Except for a few rare case outliers, it doesn’t matter if I’m using Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon music, etc. Sure they all have different features, but I can blast Taylor Swift to my heart’s content and never leave one app
I generally agree with him, but there are a lot of people who pirate simply because they don’t want to pay. And I’m not casting moral judgment here, i just feel like it bears mentioning lol “almost always” is pretty generous
If you hand me a $10 version of a thing or a $5 option of the exact same thing, I’m taking the $5. Free is no different. Especially when they can do it from the comfort of their home and not drive to a mall to buy the CD or whatever. Remember what year it was when this all started man.
If you’re going to be a smartass then I have no desire to continue this conversation. I am talking about when piracy became mainstream via napster because it became easy for people to get free music.
Actually not very true in regards to gaming at least, a study found a decently wide majority of game pirates end up buying the game. Alot of em just either use it as a demo or to bypass the copy protection garbage that fucks up the game they want to pay for.
There is no way they could possibly know the percentage of Pirates to do that. Just because it occurs doesn’t mean there aren’t countless people who do it for free things. It’s also important to remember that those claims come from advocates, so you need to take it with a ton of caveats/pinches of salt. They have a pretty strong incentive to make that case.
I don’t need to prove that people download free media because it’s free because it’s literally the reason for it. The motivations may change but the entire appeal of piracy is that it’s free. It’s why Napster was created.
For gaming, you’ve got Steam, which is pretty close to the ideal legit content delivery service. You don’t even necessarily have to pirate in order to demo games if you’re comfortable paying up front and making a decision within 2 hours.
Nothing similar exists or has existed for TV/Movies. Netflix was pretty good for a while, but you’ve never had the option to download the content to your own hard drive. Now you’re not even allowed to log in to your account on as many devices as you want.
Give me a service that’s a free storefront where I can pay a one-time fee for content that I’m actually interested in and download it to my hard drive as many times in as many places as I care to. Bonus points if I can stream to other devices that I’m logged in to and lend my purchases to my friends & family like I can with Steam. I don’t care if there’s DRM in the form of me having to log in to actually use the content if I can use it the way I want.
No it also means it’s a service problem in the sense that it’s not priced right for a geography. Pricing a game $70 where local average monthly income is $120 a month is a service problem. If you expect people from that geographic region to pay, the product should be priced within their means. And thus argument is valid only for digital goods where every new copy of the said goods costs mere few cents.
You’re gonna have to put in some work to convince me he used “service“ to also say “too expensive” when he said that. Hell GAAS as a concept didn’t even exist when he said that.
opportunity cost: login, type name in search bar, enjoy in good quality, language and subtitles of choice
Piracy:
monetary costs: 0-5 €/month (hardware/vpn)
opportunity costs: keep up to date with existing aggregator sites, take protective measures against identification, be wary of malware, limited scope of languages and subtitles, varying quality
Current streaming services:
monetary costs: 100 €/month or more, if you cover most services
opportunity cost: login to each service, look if they have the particular series/movie, be limited by region to which languages and subtitles you can use, have only certain episodes or certain seasons of a series, get a movie as a result, but actually have to pay extra for lending it…
People choose whether to pay monetary or opportunity costs. For a broke student priacy might still be the way to go, because they have time but not money. For most people a convenient streaming service will be the way to go though, because not having to worry about everything around and just finding your movie/series in 30 seconds, after you put dinner in the plates is the preferred option.
The current situation combines high monetary costs with high opportunity costs, so that piracy becomes attractive to many people, who would be happy to pay for a streaming service, that actually covers everything.
So i think “almost always” is perfectly applicable. Also keep in mind, that the offer of pirated stuff is directly related to the demand. if the demand reduces, so will the offer, which in this case would make piracy even less convenient. Of course the pricing matters, and if the one streaming service would cost say 50 €/month, more people would pirate again. But the dominant factor first is the service quality.
He made that statement when streaming barely existed. People were still primarily buying DVDs. That was the late 2000’s when it was only Netflix, maybe Hulu was just starting, and game streaming was barely a concept.
No it also means it’s a service problem in the sense that it’s not priced right for a geography. Pricing a game $70 where local average monthly income is $120 a month is a service problem. If you expect people from that geographic region to pay, the product should be priced within their means. And thus argument is valid only for digital goods where every new copy of the said goods costs mere few cents.
People who pirate because they don’t want to pay will never, ever pay. Not worth considering them to be honest.
For the record, you can use justwatch.com and it will tell you exactly where you can watch it, and which seasons. But I’m still not paying for multiple subscriptions.
The best public option is Proton imo. With paid subscriptions you even get access to Secure Core servers where Proton runs their own data centers instead of hiring 3rd-parties like NordVPN, etc.
Case-point: Nord has been hacked before bc of third-party data centers. Proton has no breaches so far and does regular security audits, has plenty of servers outside the 14 Eyes Alliance, and actively fund privacy focused projects.
Mullvad is a close second bc of their anonymous payments.
It really depends on the quantity and sensitivity of the content I’d say.
But Proton has replaced everything I used Google for (Drive/Email). Proton will work for a good 90% of everyone most likely.
The plan to deprecate Chrome V2 extensions has been constantly postponed again and again for years now. There is NO SCHEDULED DATE for this to happen currently, and when it is announced it will be more than 6 months out.
If Google really wanted to kill ad blockers, they would have done this years ago.
They don’t. They want to force ad blockers and other similar extensions to use more efficient APIs that don’t slow down the web. Extension developers overall (not just ad blockers) aren’t happy with the changes, so they’re still working on the APIs.
I’m going to use Chrome as long as I can. If they update and break my Adblock extensions (and there isn’t a fix in a day or two from devs), I switch browsers or find some other workaround.
I’m glad people with more ability to avoid the problem are trying to do so proactively (via ad-on updates, alternative browsers, etc)… so I don’t need to worry about an ‘escape route’… because I know there will be one.
You are mostly right. Think about how many people use chrome on corporate office computers that they do not have permission to install anything on or modify. It’s part of the reason Windows is so dominant. Businesses run windows and chrome a shit ton. I work for a Fortune 100 company. It’s Windows and Chrome across the whole company.
I work for a large company and its the same. They even force-install Chrome despite Edge already being there! Yes, some people will make the privacy argument that Microsoft takes your data, but so will Google, and it’s not as if the business cared either way, because if they did they’d install an adblocker or Firefox, which they don’t.
Hate to say it, but I think you’re giving the average person way too much credit. Most people are just not that smart.
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of them are stupider than that.” - George Carlin
Average and below internet users are not the kind of people you meet on Lemmy. They are people like the aging Gen-Xer who doesn’t know the difference between “the internet” and a web browser, or the kid whose parents shoved a tablet in their face to get them to be quiet for an hour.
Most people want computers to be an appliance like a washing machine - the thought that they can shape their own experience on their phone or computer never even occurs to them.
I suspect they spend most of their time in apps and not surfing the internet. Just a guess really since I saw the mobile traffic exceeded desktop. A lot of people don’t spend hours on the “internet” surfing. Tic Tok sure. Hell I’m getting more and more like that. Even when I use chrome I still only go the the same sites for the most part. lol
Google’s doing a pretty shitty job on that front since uBlock is already prepared with a new version that will work largely the same after the changeover.
I don’t think it’s just one post, but before last month Gorhill would regularly post to Reddit about it. The MV3 extension is already live in the extension store as well.
Whole idea is weird and as of now its lacking features. Like no ability to look on the other instance local feed without registrating there (at least not in apps i use). Also needing to type whole adress with instance name if you want some community from other instance is unhandy.
Also, as far as i understand, there can be the same communities on different instances, so you could subscribe to, idk, cat community on lemmy.ml, but not see anything from cat community on lemmy.world. If its true its kinda stupid, i think there should be a way to associate comunities across fedarated instances.
Hell, even registration is kinda messed up. As lemmy.world shown, you easilly can sign up on overpopulated instances which would drop several times a day. Not sure, it probably fixed for now, but that was a problem when i started.
So far i like the idea and want it to succeed and become popular. But with how elitist people here are usually towards users from other platforms and with overall roughness it kinda seems unlikelly. Maybe it will change when current apps get better, or reddit app developers make versions for lemmy, idk.
Yes, but you would be seeing ALL posts from everywhere your instance knows about.
I kind of like the idea of being on lemmy.world, filtering to say aussie.zone and getting it to show me local.
Or being able to simply get a list of every community on another instance.
No, i mean not all, but local from other instances. I dont remember why i needed it, probably discussion of more specialised instances out there. Most down to earth example i can imagine now would probably be trying to find instance on your local language (other than english, ofc).
There are instances dedicated to other languages, but because they are new, and has not a lot of people, they won’t push at the top of your feed. The best thing for now is to help those instances grow by contributing to the instance and communities. As more activity sprouts, more and more specialized communities and instances will get pushed to the top.
As a start, you can select Hot or New rather than active and see if there are specialized regional instances. Or try directly searching for it.
If not start your own community in the language you desire. Bear in mind that lemmy only has 200k users. And most are probably from the US. So you’ll likely see more mainstream communities and in English.
If that’s still not enough, the best I can advise is to wait until it matures. The more mainstream it gets the more lesser known communities and regional instances can develop or start.
Yeah, probably. Still hope it will be an option in the future. I think the biggest jump in popularity gonna heppen when there is gonna be more developed apps for browsing it, considering that some QoL problems could be fixed by those developers.
I’m optimistic. So many apps are developing at an astonishing rate. Recall that third party apps offer better experience than official reddit. Given time, third party apps will do the same too.
Agreeing that it's not a seamless transition in user experience from Reddit to Lemmy/kbin. But one thing that at least the instance that I'm on (kbin.social) makes easy is subscribing to various communities (or magazines, which is what they are called on kbin):
I go to the Magazines screen in kbin.social, type.in the general topic I'm interested in (in your example, cats). The search results in kbin.social bring me all of the magazines and communities that have cat in the name, and I subscribe to them all. (Meaning, I don't have to type out the full community address.)
Yes, a lot of it will be redundant and if I don't subscribe to specific communities I may miss some stuff. But I can say that now I have a ton pf.contwct that I'm interested in my "Subscribed" feed (similar to the home feed on Reddit).
I dunno. Lemmy isn’t all that weird outside the first little bit of choosing an instance and signing up for communities. Everything since that has felt extremely normal to me. Some more thought about that and a good instance onboarding workflow can be implemented, that seems like a solvable problem.
I completely agree, I don’t find it difficult at all. But I have already tried to recommend it to a couple of friends and just having to go through those first steps was enough for them not to want to use Lemmy.
Lemmy isn’t weird at all. Now P2P platforms like secure scuttlebutt and aether, that’s some weird stuff. I couldn’t get them working at all (or maybe nobody is using these anymore). P2P is very confusing for me. I assume that a federated network is as confusing for many people as p2p social networks are confusing for me. I guess there will be someone out there who reads my comment and be like: “What? P2P networks are so simple, what don’t you understand?” I guess people just have different amount of tolorance to being confused by complexity of something before they just give up. I couldn’t figure out those P2P systems so I just give up.
I’m sorry, I don’t know if “general user” means what I think it means. English is not my first language.
What I meant was that most people who use the internet and social media on a regular basis aren’t exactly nerdy/tech-savvy. So as soon as you start talking to them about federated instances and whatnot, they lose interest.
But your content would go over so much better in those places. Pretty sure you’ve already found that your Musk-loving, antisemitic, anti-lgbtq+, misogynistic, garbage is not going to make it very far here. “cancel culture” back at it again. Guess Musk isn’t the big brain you think he is. I’m sure you’ll be back with your braindead zombie tribe in no time.
Reddit was too weird for most people until they ended up being in their Google search results for most topics. It will take a while but the Fediverse will eventually reach a level of popularity and mainstream utility.
Yeah I agree. Arguably reddit isn’t even mainstream, and it is exponentially larger than Lemmy now and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
I’m really loving Lemmy, but it is not even remotely a factor if we are having a conversation about things that are mainstream enough to reflect popular opinion.
We could have it both, where big instances like LemmyWorld or BeeHaw becomes the well known public interface, while they maintain federation with smaller instances.
The main thing I don’t get is that the top talent at your company are the ones that can easily find another job instead of putting up with your BS. The people that aren’t competent enough to leave on a whim are the ones you’re going to be keeping.
I’ve seen a lot of people with that attitude still get let go. I’ve fired people with huge ego’s that were extremely valuable to operations that really thought they were untouchable. As good as you think you are, there’s someone else just as good or better that will take your place.
That being said, fuck working for someone that doesn’t respect you, or makes demands of you purely because they want to flex on you.
Overall, employers hold almost all the power in their relationships over employees.
Depending on individual and conditions, some may find themselves with the privilege of slightly improved bargaining power, but no assumption is stable or reliable, and ultimately employers have the final word. A company always may find other workers more easily than, in the greater balance, individuals may find other job positions.
Workers have no inherent or intrinsic value in the relationship. Companies value workers only for their labor, and do so under systems of labor commodification captured beneath the whims of the market.
A company always may find other workers more easily than, in the greater balance, individuals may find other job positions.
This (emphasis mine, for clarity) is not accurate. There are currently more jobs than people, and people of certain positions have enormous power in job negotiations.
Companies value workers only for their labor
And workers only value companies for the pay. This isn’t really an argument about anything
A job opening being posted offers no important information about the situation inside any company, nor about the count of applications that have been received, nor the count that has been ignored or rejected.
For most of us, not having a job represents having a much higher risk of death. The conditions of workers are essentially conditions of work or die.
If you think workers have as much bargaining power as companies, then you are, frankly, deluded. You may personally not notice the depth of the disparity, due to your having certain privileges, but you are still giving a distorted representation of your own conditions.
Workers literally have more bargaining power than employers at the moment, be I’m not deluded about that. I work in retention and partner with recruiting daily.
You have argued that because you have encountered an abundance of job listings, therefore, employers have less bargaining power than employees.
Job listings are not a scarce resource. Any employer may create any number for any reason merely by choosing.
Your argument is fatuous.
The entire structure of the relationship between worker and employer is based on inequitable balance of power. Workers must sell their labor to employers in order to earn the means of their survival, in order to avoid destitution, homelessness, and starvation. Employers, in turn, benefit from a disciplined and stratified working class, and from a reserve army of labor.
The prevailing principle for workers, under the employment system, is work or die.
I’m not talking about seeing lots of job listings. I’m talking about the realities of recruiting personnel and the demographic and structural changes that cause those realities
Sorry you’re having trouble, but your experience is not the broad reality. There are more jobs than people and workers haven’t been this empowered since post-WW2
The prevailing principle for workers, under the employment system, is work or die
There is no system in which this is not the case, and that has nothing to do with your bargaining power.
I’m talking about the realities of recruiting personnel and the demographic and structural changes that cause those realities
…your experience is not the broad reality.
You are now being dishonest, by insinuating that I have presented an argument from personal experience, and also that you have presented a structural argument.
Both suggestions are false.
You have given no structural argument. I have given one, and have not appealed to personal experience.
There are more jobs than people and workers
As I say, job openings is not relevant. A job opening is not a resource of limited supply.
Any employer may post any number of job openings at any time, and also may eliminate any of them, at any time, and also may eliminate any job, at any time, dismissing whoever is holding it.
Indeed, an employer may also post a job opening, and simply reject every applicant, or even ignore every one.
There is no system in which this is not the case,
Yes, there is, obviously. As long as distribution of basic needs is decoupled from the system of organizing labor, everyone may survive even if not providing labor.
and that has nothing to do with your bargaining power.
It does, completely, for reasons I already explained. Only one side of the bargaining relationship is being subjected to grave threat.
Any employer may post any number of job openings at any time, and also may eliminate any of them, at any time, and also may eliminate any job, at any time, dismissing whoever is holding it.
Serious question: are you currently working as an adult in the professional world?
A job is a social relationship between a worker and an employer.
A job opening is a declaration by an employer of being willing to receive applications. If any application is accepted, by a job being offered to an applicant, then the applicant may accept the job, and may hold it, as long as the employer remains willing to maintain the employment relationship.
A job opening is only a declaration.
Do you understanding the meaning of bargaining power?
Please think about the substantive meaning of the concept, and then provide a clear explanation, based on your understanding.
Now, do the same for a company declaring a job opening. Explain the meaning, clearly.
Please offer an explanation of how you may arrive, in general, at a sound conclusion, about which side of a negotiation has more bargaining power.
Now, please provide a meaningful argument that job applicants have more bargaining power than employers.
You have so far attempted to poison the well, but have not provided any genuine argument for your stated conclusion.
Either you are trolling, or you are simply extremely thoughtless in forming your beliefs.
You reveal a complete lack of understanding of social structure.
You have rifled through a handful a variations of the same general theme, attempting to argue, or perhaps attempting to avoid arguing, that employers have less bargaining power than employees.
The employment relationship is not a relationship of mutuality or parity between the two participating parties, employer and employee.
A business is a social structure, which is completely different from an individual worker. Meanwhile, the billionaires who own businesses, and through them accumulate private wealth, have no shared interests with their workers.
Each business may expand to employ arbitrarily many workers, but workers have only limited time to sell.
Businesses control the entirety of resources in society that the population requires to survive. They profit from the labor of workers, who sell their labor to earn the right to live.
The number of job openings is not related to the bargaining power of employees.
It cannot be overstated that your comparison to romantic partnership is so utterly absurd.
Oh the invaluable people do get fired. The problem is that the company never replace them, because they can’t be replaced.
Their value is not in how smart or skilled they are but in how much they know of their work in the company. Most of this work is not documented and it can take a decade to build this knowledge.
These people are key elements of the functioning of the company. You lose months of productivity each year simply because they’re not there, and you might even lose years of work that’s now unmaintainable.
I don’t know, if companies are too arrogant to see that or if they’d rather have people who obey than a working company. I bet on the second though.
Better yet if the workers unionized they could end up with a strike or no workers at all. If these were the good ol days they may even wake up without their kneecaps.
I don’t think being fickle and being competent are necessarily linked.
Some of the best workers i’ve met over the years are making way less than some of the worst workers i’ve met, just because the ones who could talk the talk and play the bullshit made way more money and swap jobs way more often.
The highest paid company hoppers are undoubtably the first ones to go, that doesn’t mean they are the most important, talented people though.
Yeah, but you’re thinking about when the company picks people to fire. Forcing people back to the office decreases worker satisfaction across the board, and workers will respond individually. I’d argue that those highest paid will be most willing to suffer the inconvenience of commuting, regardless of their talent, so the “make working here annoying” plan will tend to retain higher paid employees while losing lower paid people through attrition. Likewise, workers are more likely to tolerate the annoyances if they don’t have any other options. Good people can more easily job-hop, so this strategy is also likely to retain the lower-performing employees while the top performers go elsewhere, not considering pay rate. Total labor costs will decline, because there’s fewer people working, but it’s not an efficient selection process.
Long story short: pissing on your employees results in a smaller, lower quality workforce.
I’d argue that those highest paid will be most willing to suffer the inconvenience of commuting, regardless of their talent
I’m not sure this is accurate. Most of the highly paid people I know (myself included), feel quite empowered by the current job market and can basically pick jobs at their leisure.
Yeah, I think I phrased that badly. I just meant that people can be paid to tolerate annoyances. More likely to happen in reverse, like if I’m going to have to do this unpleasant thing, then you’re going to have to pay me extra, but the principle’s the same.
I agree on performance, but I’m well paid and would tolerate almost zero unjustified inconvenience. I can afford to take a cut, but in reality would probably earn even more elsewhere.
More experienced folk are also more likely to go freelance, since they have the skills, experience and contacts. Perm roles only make sense when they bring stability and benefits. I expect to see this a lot more, if RTO continues.
If bad people are aware that they’re bad, they’re strongly incentivized to not risk their livelihoods by voluntarily ending their employment.
If people are clinging to a job tightly even as working condition deteriorates, it’s an indicator that they don’t think they’ll fare well on the job market.
The disconnect has more to do with perception of their own value. Good people who underestimate themselves awill be inclined to stay. Bad people who know they’re bad will be more inclined to stay.
Bad people who think they’re good, and good people who know they’re good will be the most likely to leave.
So, the strategy of intentionally tanking your conditions to prune bad people actually only successfully prunes bad people who think they’re good.
On the other hand, you loose good people who know they’re good, entrenches the bad people who know they’re bad, and demoralized the shit out of good people who don’t realize they’re good.
How are “bad people who think they are good” likely to leave, wouldn’t they find it hard to switch jobs because they are bad? that is, they thought they could easily switch jobs, but find out in interviews that it’s not easy, thus they are forced to stay?
Have you ever had a middle manager above you who constantly has to interfere as if to prove how necessary they are?
This is similar. It’s not always about the amount/quality of your work or even about the money; sometimes it’s just about control. Those who don’t actually do much (again, managers and CEOs, etc) want desperate people they can rule over.
Yep. One of my friends works in sales and has worked from home for 3 1/2 of her 4 years with her current company. She’s in the top 10 performers out of 250-ish people in her division and her company is going to lose her if they stick to the demand that people return to the office. She’s waiting to see what happens, but she’s already had recruiters put out feelers once the tentative plan got out, and there are other top performers ready to jump ship too.
Even better, the competent ones ask for more money
Seriously the actions of all these big companies shows they don’t really give a shit about retaining top talent. Unfortunately, for big name companies, they’ll always have an inflow of talented new grads who are willing to give up their dignity to get their name on their resumes, and it’s cheaper (in the short term, which is all shareholders care about) to churn and burn them then to invest in long term talent
We are all freely interchangeable widgets in their calculations. They don’t have time to consider that some people might be better than the job than others.
They’re betting that some will leave, most will stay, and even if the some that leave are the best, most of their money is made by the vast majority of people behind them.
They’re looking at trends, not individuals. Individuals don’t matter to them.
They’re looking at trends, not individuals. Individuals don’t matter to them.
Exactly.
They’re going to learn better, but it’s going to be an expensive process.
The irony is that the average worker already knows better.
“Name two people at your workplace who, if they quit, everything will go to shit.”
We can all do it. Only the CEO can’t. And many of us would name differet people at the same workplace, and still be correct. But the CEO rarely knows that, or more likely can only name two, themselves, when their real risk is closer to 200.
I put up with hellish demands and a nightmare commute because I thought working at Important Company was a privilege. And to so degree it was. But I don’t put up with bullshit anymore and that was a lesson I had to learn on my own, the hard way.
yup - early on in my career, working at a specific FAANG company was my life’s greatest ambition, now I don’t think there’s any amount of money they might feasibly offer me that would make me work there lol - Once you have enough income to be comfortable, work life balance is worth more than anything
Had a convo with my mum last month, where she was concerned that I wasn’t looking to supercharge my career as I enter my 40s. She couldn’t understand why I’d declined an interview with Meta.
I had to spell it out… I won’t miss that extra money. I don’t have an expensive lifestyle, and I don’t want one. I’d miss the time lost with my kids, and I’d sure as shit regret the stress and anxiety of additional work pressure.
But then, I also had to explain why staying in an unhappy marriage “for the kids” is infinitely worse than peaceful and happy co-parenting.
It’s because the people making these decisions aren’t incrntivised to think about the long term effect for the company. All they need to worry about is if it makes line go up in the short-term so they can get a fat bonus then use how much line went up to get a job somewhere else before the shit hits the fan. Rinse and repeat.
The metaverse died because it didn’t mean anything, there was no clear thing you could point to and say “this is the metaverse”. It was a collection of buzzwords designed to sell a dream to investors and nothing more.
As a developer who loves to tinker with web stuff, I feel most of the tech scene and Silicon Valley are full of people who went into development just for the money. I almost see it every day.
I feel the same way. They’re in it to become a unicorn and get a big exit. They don’t care about making good software, just profitable software. The vibe in Silicon Valley stopped being hackers and became bankers.
I didn’t go into tech for the money, but after several years of grinding I’m definitely at the point where I’m only still in it for the money. I don’t even want to think about computers outside of work anymore.
Sounds like you are just not in the role or company that appreciates you. I’ve had a similar experience at the beginning, but I kept looking until I found a company that did, so I hope one day you do as well.
This is the cycle of co-option that takes place with any career that becomes profitable.
A lot of people don’t realize that computers and programming in general were seen as “women’s work” or “nerd shit” until especially the dotcom boom, and career women and nerds (of all genders) were displaced in favor of MBA-bros who the VCs and CEOs didn’t disdain (not by being forced out, but by not being given the jobs and funding; the “paper ceiling” is often used for this).
Machine learning and crypto were also relegated to being “nerd shit” in their nascent years, and now look who populates those particular spaces: non-technical MBA-bros and snake oil salesmen trying to cash in on the hype (and building on the uncompensated work of others… in machine learning’s case, quite literally so).
Yes, it wasn’t always the case. I was in the Silicon Valley in the 2000’s and it was full of techies who really believed in the open web, and even Google was a proponent of open standards.
A few years later it seems like the tech matured enough that being technically savvy was no longer necessary to be a successful founder. Slowly it stopped being about technical innovations and became about raising money, product marketing, A/B testing, etc.
Selling dreams to VCs has long been the game, but VCs started getting dumber and greedier as all the low hanging opportunities were used up. So tech startups had to make sillier and sillier claims and business plans to keep raking in VC dough.
Subscriptions have been big VC keywords for the last 7-8 years, as data harvesting started to be monopolized by a few big owners. Ads are trying to make a comeback as subscription fatigue sets in, which is why blockers are being targeted lately.
I’m not looking forward to the next method of extracting wealth from the masses in trade for VC investment. Probably another form of slavery or subjugation they haven’t found a way to hide yet.
It’s not strictly true that it didn’t mean anything, but I would say that it consisted of a couple weakly-defined and often mutually incompatible visions is what could be.
Meta thought they could sell people on the idea of spending hundreds of dollars on specialized hardware to allow them to do real life things, but in a shitty Miiverse alternate reality where every activity was monetized to help Zuck buy the rest of the Hawaiian archipelago for himself.
Cryptobros thought the Metaverse was going to be a decentralized hyper-capitalist utopia where they could live their best lives driving digital Lambos and banging their harem of fawning VR catgirl hotties after they all made their billions selling links to JPEGs of cartoon monkeys to each other.
Everybody else conflated the decentralized part of the cryptobros’ vision with the microtransactionalized walled garden of Meta’s implementation, and then either saw dollar signs and scrambled to get a grift going, or ran off to write think pieces about a wholly-imaginary utopia or dystopia they saw arising from that unholy amalgamation.
In reality, Meta couldn’t offer a compelling alternative to real life, and the cryptobros didn’t have the funds or talent to actually make their Snow Crash fever dream a reality, so for now the VR future remains firmly the domain of VRChat enthusiasts, hardcore flight simmers, and niche technical applications.
In adittion to this make sure to disable the telemetry that’s on by default. If you want even better protection from fingerprinting etc, use arkenfox/librewolf (librewolf being preconfigured fork of firefox)
Especially your security programs, like third-party antivirus or firewalls. They can install system-level plugins in your browsers, and sometimes those don’t work well. Windows defender and the built in firewall are good enough and play nice with other programs.
I honestly hadn’t considered that eBook licensing data could be used in the way they describe in the article. EBooks becoming part of big data surveillance somehow feels especially disheartening to me.
Lately I feel like I’ve been duped for years since I used to believe strongly in the phrase “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” but it feels like with every paid product or service nowadays you’re STILL the product…
Pirate the ebook, buy a paper copy to support the author (they generally even earn more per paper copy, iirc). Ideally at a local book store, as they are a dying breed as well.
Don’t like dead trees around? Gift it to someone. Or ask the local library if they want it
Lately I feel like I’ve been duped for years since I used to believe strongly in the phrase “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” but it feels like with every paid product or service nowadays you’re STILL the product…
Yep, I take issue with that phrase as well for two reasons.
like you say, most of the time you pay and your data is still harvested, because if you’re not collecting all that valuable data your shareholders will demand to know why you’re ignoring such a massive revenue stream.
plenty of stuff IS genuinely free without you being the product. FOSS as a general rule will not track you and you aren’t the product.
Now I appreciate that people who frequent Lemmy probably know about that exception to the rule, but plenty of people don’t, and I’ve seen people refuse to use open source software because they believe it being truly free is too good to be true, so they stick with an inferior paid-for alternative thinking some black box proprietary code is more private and secure so long as you paid for it.
In my experience, street names, especially on major roads, often don’t appear until you zoom right in - usually to the point of the road width basically filling the screen.
As Gabe Newell said: “Piracy isn’t a pricing issue, its a service issue”
As my friend said: "every time a plastic video disc says " operation not permitted " a torrent is born…
As I say: “People will pay when it’s easy, more reliable and more convenient.” As a software product manager, I forbid my product from ever wasting developer cycles with copy protection… It’s expensive to deliver, annoying to real customers and doesn’t make us any more money…
I don’t disagree with anything but I feel like GabeN said that before streaming and subscriptions took over.
Photoshop is an incredibly easy to use and powerful tool for creators - I’d be happy to drop like $200 on, for example, the 2024 version. I’m not happy to spend $10 or $30+ a month for life to use it, especially when they lock you in to a year subscription and charge you a fee if you cancel early so you literally can’t just sub only the month when you need it, it’s the whole year, period. I’ll just pirate or use photopea or whatever.
Similar for streaming. Netflix gave us the option to pay for more screens to watch on. Now suddenly it matters whose house it’s in?? All while you’re constantly removing value from the platform and you cancel anything decent if the production value is too high? Fuck you man I’m not paying like $30 monthly for that.
Please do keep voting with your wallet - its one of the few remaining ways to express our discontent!) That being said, I feel like both of those examples are where the service provided by adobe and then Netflix are terrible.
Adobe is making you buy a whole year and Netflix is hassling you for “letting your pensioner mum watch your account”… To me, both of those are examples of bad service (coupled with cost).
For me, a counter example for me is amazon.com: I hate what they’re doing to the retail landscape but find it hard to resist, as I find them SOOO convenient, and their customer service (for now) is absolutely stunning!!! Now if their prices were too high, I’d personally probably pay for that convenience a bit. (Where there model breaks for me completely is warranty major purchases: I’ve had warranty denied by manufacturers for items purchased through non approved amazon resellers. So now, for me, anything over $100 and I’m looking for direct purchase from the manufacturer as a preference. )
That’s part of it. Another part is middle management can’t function without seeing you. Finally, it’s not worth it to a company to maintain a lease on a building if nobody works there and it’s not easy getting out of those leases.
I agree with most of this except the lease is a sunk cost, making people come in based on a variable that won’t change is bad decision making, the discussion should be made independently of lease. I agree some managers think this way, it’s usually the ones who could benefit from remedial business finance classes.
Yes and no. It’s more like a trap that the company is trapped in. It’s the corporate equivalent of having to keep renting an apartment you don’t live in anymore and can’t sub-let. The sunk cost fallacy applies, but also it’s a case of “we’re stuck with this and we’re going to USE it even if it kills our wage slaves.”
The larger issue may be that companies occupying the buildings supports interests of the owning class, and so its influence is being applied accordingly to shape the larger social forces.
I’m skeptical a company would take that. They want to be able to shut down contracts with employee on a whim but somehow they would engage for a 20 years in a building? If it’s not a big industry I severely doubt it, and those are rarely I city centers for obvious reasons.
What would you recommend to capitalists, for defending themselves from the broader population, that might be a superior alternative to using human shields?
It never died, because it already existed for fucking years: Active Worlds from 1995 is where I started, Second Life later, now the dominant “metaverse” is VR Chat.
The corporate simpletons just never did their homework to see what the market is like for this.
The word is meaningless, nothing like the metaverse as described in snowcrash ever existed. If you’re talking about a multiplayer game that tries to mimic the real word then you’re right. But that’s not what the metaverse actually is…or what the word stood for, before being ripped to shreds as a buzzword.
Yeah they (Facebook) chose the word as a form of marketing to rebrand something that already existed. It’s similar to how we went from “machine learning” to “AI”.
That’s the thing I hate: the word AI is being misused. It’s not a buzzword, at least it wasn’t supposed to be. It’s artifical intelligence, not in the sense of having a brain but in the sense of being an intelligent algorithm solving an issue. The path finder algorithm A* (A Star) is in this group. Machine learning is a sub category of AI, nothing less.
Even further back there was Lucasfilm’s Habitat all the way back in 1986. It’s kind of shocking how little the idea of the “Metaverse” has evolved since back then. It’s still just some virtual space with avatars, different hats and chatting.
The whole Reddit debacle has really made me rethink all my services. I recently installed duck duck go and still getting used to it, so not quite sure if I’m ready to make another drastic change.
I used to love Firefox in 2006 or so, but got Chrome when it was released and forgot about Firefox. I think I’ll open a tab in my chrome browser for the Firefox page now…this is how I remind myself to delve deeper into stuff later. Thanks for the inspiration, everyone. Google has irked me ever since removing the Don’t Be Evil mantra.
If you like the chrome feel, you should check out a browser called brave. It’s built off of chromium (read as: looks like chrome) and can run all the extensions you like, but is built to be privacy minded.
The difference between ddg and Firefox for me is that Firefox is a genuinely good product, whereas ddg is noticeably worse than Google. Still trying to find a good search alternative.
I do all my personal browsing on Firefox now. I’m still using chrome, but strictly for work stuff. It’s nice to keep those activities separate, especially since many apps I use for work still discriminate against Firefox.
True. It takes a big chance to switch browsers for some. And there may be learning curves, but being intentional about our internet and app use goes a long way to saving headaches in the future. The early investment (ie learning a more open source and free, even FOSS software) will help mitigate loss in case a profit driven company changes or “pivots” to a new direction.
The best time to start with a new browser is when you get a new device. Since you have to re enter your logins or re enable your pw manager anyway, it’s just a convenient time. That’s when I switched, about 1 year ago when I upgraded phones.
Duckduckgo app tracking blocker is my new jam too. Which I leaned about here on lemmy about 1 weeks ago when I joined
If you use a password manager like bitwarden, there’s no need to enter all your logins. I guess that’s why I’m a bit browser agnostic. I use different browsers for different purposes. And I don’t have to worry about remembering my passwords with bitwarden.
Firefox has a super simple way to import everything from your Chrome install. And from what I can tell it has every feature plus more. Was very easy for me to switch. I was actually inspired to try it as my daily driver since Chrome hogs an uncomfortable amount of RAM on my laptop
There was one extension I used in Chrome that I haven’t found a Firefox replacement for, but I stopped trying to look a while ago and just live without it.
Was a specific kind of cookie manager: you could whitelist a set of websites to keep their cookies. Everything else would be deleted when you told the extension to do so.
Too many websites need cookies that stick around indefinitely. But I also don’t want to delete everything everytime I close Firefox, because I may want to keep a website around for a few days without wanting to bother adding it to a whitelist.
I want something more complex than a basic whitelist and blacklist. I already use that in Firefox and it helps somewhat but not wholly. I want to manage specifically when it happens and in accordance to said lists. I haven’t found anything that handles that in the settings.
Most Chrome extensions can easily be run in Firefox. Simply download the CRX and upload an copy to addons.mozilla.org as an unlisted extension and within a few hours the extension should be approved and ready to install in Firefox.
Reddit being enshittified is what motivated me to switch back to Android. I don’t want to continue using a a locked ecosystem only for apple to one day say: “Welp, no more adblocks 😜 Oh you use VLC? Dude that’s for pirates only. Signal? That’s for terrorists. Standard Notes? What evil plans are you hiding? Banned Banned and Banned.”
I used iPhones because everyone else was using them so I kinds fell for the peer pressure thinking “Hmm… what are the odds that Apple become evil? Probably don’t have to worry about it.” The Reddit shitshow just triggered a fear in me that made me rethink about my life decisions. Apple’s locked ecosystem suddenly looked terrifying to me, and I just wanna nope out. So I got an Android phone and gave the iPhone to someone. I love my apks and don’t need to worry about Google-Play shennanigans.
People have been creating and posting realistic looking fake celebrity nudes for quite literally decades now, but now they’re using AI and its suddenly a problem?
I’m not sure if you noticed, but people who write for a living have suddenly started writing quite a lot about how technology that can write and generate media are bad.
Which is so silly, because AI writing still needs a human editor. I write for a living and there tons of work that involves using AI as a tool to increase productivity rather than to replace writers completely… like photoshop didnt put photographers out of business it just changed the work flow.
I work in a clinical setting where some Doctors are trying an AI program for generating their clinical notes out of the casual conversation between them and the patient. It’s way off its mark for what we demand in quality. It requires significant editing from the healthcare provider, and if the note is very robust it quickly becomes more of a chore than modern voice transcription. Our review is not great so far.
Sounds more like trying to use a screwdriver to hammer in screws
This is what I think about AI being forced into many things these days. Feels more like an attempt to justify subscription plans than anything actually productive.
In part this is because the SotA model is by far GPT-4, but OpenAI has pigeon holed it into ‘chatbot.’
The earliest versions of it pre-release when it was being incorporated into Bing were amazing. Probably the most impressive thing I’ve seen in tech.
But it was too human-like and freaking users out, so rather than wait for the market to adjust they did extensive fine tuning to make the large language model trained to predict human ouput be less likely to produce human-like output.
The problem is that they don’t have a scalpel for this sort of thing and ended up with a model that’s very good as a chatbot within a certain scope, but significantly impaired at some of the outside the box mechanics visible early on.
And because it’s the SotA, everyone is now using it to fine tune their own models.
So the entire industry is being set back in practical applications outside of “kind of boring chatbot.”
I can see why people are upset, I can agree that distribution of these images can be an issue, but this has the same energy of "I am mad that a certain picture of me is on the internet, I demand that they take it down." Sorry, that's not going to happen any time soon.
I don’t think many have gone viral on social media before or took less than 5 minutes to create. My uneducated guess is that previously this stuff would be in some niche forum in the recesses of the internet
You could be honest and acknowledge that there is a massive difference in time investment and skill required between the old way of creating fake porn of unconsenting people and the new way.
It's because a person can crank out a deep fake in 3 hours, and a crappy one in one. It never cropped up because... well lets be real it was a couple of weirdos that were doing it, unless it bubbles up from the dark corners of the internet you risk the Streisand effect by bringing attention to it.
AI can crank out 40 in a minute. 7200 in three hours. That's an entirely different beast. The sheer mass and volume ramps up the odds of any image bubbling up from the dark corners of the web falling into the limelight and now this problem that wasn't big enough to merit thought is rearing up it's ugly head right in front of us.
You can generate unique pictures of Taylor Swift faster than even Taylor swift can generate pictures of Taylor Swift. Within one hour of Taylor swift being seen with a man (and you have enough images of the man) you can create a dozen images of her on a date with that man and attempt to sell them to paparazzi.
The problem is volume. Just like how email made everyone connected and allowed the Nigerian Prince scandal to occur.
People don’t care now because people don’t thin famous people should have any right to dignity, but their minds are gonna change really quickly when it’s their sister, mother or daughter.
fastcompany.com
Top