It’s honestly weird to imagine them being concerned with branding at all because they are literally an umbrella corporation that doesn’t seem to interface with customers directly. Like I never think about them and I suspect having regular people think more about them would not be good for them in any way.
“Alphabet” works for that in my head because it slides off my brain. I forget they exist until something reminds me.
Arizona’s Attorney General, Kris Mayes, filed two lawsuits against Amazon on Wednesday for allegedly engaging in deceptive business practices and maintaining monopoly status. The first lawsuit accuses the company of using dark patterns to keep users from canceling their Amazon Prime subscriptions, violating Arizona’s...
People should definitely learn about these, they affect an awful lot of our modern digital environment, not just in subscriptions but all the ways companies try to manipulate our behaviour.
Ever see a cookie popup and “Accept” is a big colourful button, but if you want to decline it’s behind a grey “more options” button, then you have to scroll through a dozen different categories and disable them all, then the button has some ambiguous label like “confirm cookie choices” which gives the impression you’re accepting them again? That’s a dark pattern.
User interface design has long known how to streamline a process and communicate with a user to increase the number of people who complete a certain task, so it’s a simple matter of inverting that logic to make a task hard and obscure to reduce that number.
What’s honestly surprising is that this is actually illegal somewhere. I didn’t realise there was any legislation about this.
Meta just announced that they are trying to integrate Threads with ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.). We need to defederate them if we want to avoid them pushing their crap into fediverse....
Federation means you can defederate for any reason. It’s not a set of principles, it is an ontological arrangement whereby power is distributed. Plenty of users will look for defederated instances to join because keeping facebook out of our shit is what we want. You are free to find instances that are federated. Nobody will stop you.
To be fair to the algorithm, there may be a lot of people in your area who are just mainlining that shit 24/7 out of raw anxiety, and the algorithm is just feeding that.
I say “to be fair”, because I think this horrific description of what the algo is doing to people’s mental health is entirely accurate.
I have ublock origin on firefox and it’s really bad for me currently. This has traditionally been the good combo I believe.
Not just slowing down, but stopping, then restarting after skipping a few seconds that you cannot access no matter what.
For now the best solution I’ve found is to copy the video url, open potplayer and just hit the paste command and the video runs flawlessly.
So they’ll have to close that loophole eventually, which means enshittifying the video streaming protocol for everything that isn’t the native web viewer, which will inconvenience more people who were used to something working, leading to another workaround, leading to…
Youtube is gradually accelerating their enshittification. I’m looking forward to when it comes to a real head. Too many serious interested parties rely on it. I don’t know if peertube will be the first fallback, but I’m sure it’ll get a big bump.
David Graeber makes an excellent point in his book about debt that “people must always pay their debts” is shortsighted. If there is no mechanism for default, then lenders can get away with giving bad loans to people who can’t afford it, knowing no matter what, they will be forced to pay. When the borrower can default, the lender has to exercise discretion and can’t ruin people’s lives for marginal returns.
Also, we need to understand that the people who took on these debts - the rulers - and the people who are suffering from their national poverty, are not the same people. The IMF and World Bank pushed these debts on the rulers with the implication that they’d be able to live large by stealing a share of the money flowing in without having any personal obligation to pay it back, and with the further implication that if they didn’t accept these terms they might just be invaded.
Don’t be fooled by talk of what they owe. These people aren’t suffering because they failed some moral test. They are the victims of structural violence done by western governments.
Edit: Due to popular demand FatTony Search servers are down for the time being. but has gone open source just in time (Yes that’s how it works 😡) . You may now get responses from other users. Servers will be back up some time later.
Well if they can appeal to people’s xenophobia to deflect from the problems of landlords and capitalism in general then they’ll do that. Gotta keep capitalism chugging along, even while they tut-tut about all the problems it’s causing.
Most instances don’t have a specific copyright in their ToS, which is basically how copyright is handled on corporate social media (Meta/X/Reddit owns license rights to whatever you post on their platform when you click “Agree”). I’ve noticed some people including Copyright notices in posts (mostly to prevent AI use). Is...
I think this is a very fine distinction that would have to be settled in court and could go either way. I can only say what I think it should do. And to be honest I think copyright is garbage, but for it be consistent I don’t think that this difference should matter.
I think an important distinction for me with federation though is that it’s not just a push, you have to subscribe, so it’s a two way street. It would be similar to an RSS feed, and I’m not aware of that having any particular implications for copyright. There is certainly no explicit acknowledgement of terms baked into either protocol, so I think the only reasonable conclusion should be that it doesn’t impact copyright either way. That remains unlicensed and subject to the normal rules, which presuppose that permission is not granted.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the ban was a pretext and the sub was just something admins found objectionable for their own reasons. Like as long as mods remove material and users when an issue is brought to their attention then the sub should be fine.
The fact they don’t know why it happened is telling that they weren’t given a real chance to correct the issue. Just centralised social media things I guess.
I believe the admins do get paid. It’s the mods that were fucked over here that don’t get paid. I was really talking about your one’s overall contribution to humanity.
EDIT: I didn’t like how personal this sounded, it wasn’t mean to.
Please note that in aerodynamics, “lift” is any aerodynamic force that acts perpendicular to the relative wind on an object, so it’s lift whether it pushes a plane up, down, left, right, or pushes a sailing boat across the wind.
Also the keel of the boat that keeps it sailing in a straight line is technically providing lift in the water, although that “lift” is sideways. Also it isn’t aerodynamic lift, but hydrodynamic. The general field is called fluid dynamics, which covers both gasses and liquids.
You’ve got some good answers, but the problem with the air bouncing idea is that it ignores the air on top of the wing, or to the leeward side of the sail. The sail is pushed on by the windward air, and pulled on by the leeward air. (Edit: technically not pulled on, but you can model it that way if you take atmospheric pressure as 0 and anything lower than that as negative; it will give you correct results)
A better way to think about it is flow turning - as the wind moves past the sail, its flow is turned and the momentum change causes an equal and opposite change in momentum of the boat: www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/…/right2.html
So ideally the leading edge of the sail should be parallel to the oncoming wind, and the trailing edge will be by definition parallel to the outgoing wind. The difference in velocity between these two winds multiplied by the mass of air passing over them over time will give you the force acting on the sail.
If the leading edge isn’t parallel, the air’s transition from free flow into contact with the sail will not be smooth, and will cause losses that reduce the efficiency of the sail.
In practice, the way to achieve this parallel flow is to let out the sail until you see “luffing”, which is just the leading edge flapping a bit in the wind. Then you tighten it until the luffing disappears, at which point the sail should be correctly trimmed. As you carry on you can occasionally repeat this process to check that you’ve still got the right angle, as minor shifts in wind or boat direction can change the ideal angle of attack.
This is also called “setting” the sail. So when a ship “sets sail” it’s referring to the fact a skipper would order the crew to “set sails”, which would start them moving. Now the term also means to commence a voyage.
In some bigger boats you have strings called “telltales” on the surface of the sail. If you see them flapping you know the air flow is turbulent, and you can trim the sail until the telltales on both sides of the sail are blown into a smooth line along the sail. If you tighten the sail too much, the leeward telltales will flap. If you let it out it too much, the windward telltales will flap.
A flat surface is much less efficient as it will cause a lot more turbulence on the leeward side. A lot of work has been done to make sails form the most efficient shape, and they are always deliberately curved. The shape will change depending on the tightness of the sheet (the rope that sets the sail) and on its manufacture, but ultimately your sail shape was basically set when it was made. Different sail shapes will be optimised for different types of tack and different tasks, but I don’t know enough about that to explain more. Mainly I know that spinnakers are made for running downwind and the other sails usually have to make do for the rest of the situations, but this article tells you a lot more: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sail_components
I only just found that article, so if it disagrees with anything I’ve said here I’d defer to it.
Very high performance sails and setups can do some cool things, like racing catamarans with their very sleek hulls and optimised sails allow you to sail in a close haul within 30-something degrees of the wind, whereas most normal sailboats can’t get much closer than 45 degrees.
Edit: This seems like a decent resource for first time sailors, and gives some more in depth explanation of how to set your sails correctly: www.cruisingworld.com/learn-to-sail-101/
This is also where I learned what telltales are called. I’ve never sailed bigger boats much tbh.
Okay, I think that’s most of what I can info-dump on the basis of your question. You landed on an intersection of two of my special interests lol :)
E: You can scroll down to the dividing line if you want to read the history and not my condescending screed about your ignorance. I suspect you won’t read much of this so I’m putting this note here at the top to let you know that if you don’t read the whole comment then you’ll probably sound like a fool in your reply. I mean that’s already true but like… even moreso. If you don’t like the way I’m talking to you, you can refer yourself to the way you just talked to me.
Okay, so I think you’ve fucked up here. I think that because you seem to think I’m asking you for a demonstration, ie, for sources. But if you actually read my comment carefully you would know that I asked you for a claim. This was me politely asking you to simply say what you mean instead of hiding behind insinuations and vague hand-waving.
And the reason this is a fuck-up is because anyone who actually knew how to understand and source literature on a topic like this would have immediately known the distinction between making a claim, and demonstrating a claim. I have made quite clear claims but not yet demonstrated them. You have not made a single claim that could even be demonstrated, you have just assumed that everybody already agrees with your version to the point that it does not even need to be stated.
I also know it’s a fuck-up because I have heard this fact as a rebuttal of a common misconception several times from a number of trustworthy sources, and before I repeated it I quickly checked to make sure I had it right, and it does appear to be the consensus of historians; I found no evidence of a credible debate on this; nobody is replying to some other side on this; it is uncontroversial.
I said the same thing four different ways there because you do seem to have some trouble following what is being said.
I am now going to go beyond what I originally asked you for and give you some real information, and then after that, if you still feel like it would be a good idea, you can reply. I suspect you won’t want to though, because if you had the information to hand you wouldn’t have protested so hard against me asking for even the most basic stating of your position. You also might have read something and learned that you were wrong, but let’s not expect the moon. I suspect you went so hard because you realised you had nothing and you hoped I would be cowed by your obvious confidence, but I wasn’t. I was in fact somewhat invigorated by it.
The label now has many meanings, but when the group protested 200 years ago, technology wasn’t really the enemy
The word “Luddite,” handed down from a British industrial protest that began 200 years ago this month, turns up in our daily language in ways that suggest we’re confused not just about technology, but also about who the original Luddites were and what being a modern one actually means.
Despite their modern reputation, the original Luddites were neither opposed to technology nor inept at using it. Many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry. Nor was the technology they attacked particularly new. Moreover, the idea of smashing machines as a form of industrial protest did not begin or end with them. In truth, the secret of their enduring reputation depends less on what they did than on the name under which they did it. You could say they were good at branding.
As the Industrial Revolution began, workers naturally worried about being displaced by increasingly efficient machines. But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”
Also because I can see your fingers racing to the keyboard about this: the first article on wikipedia is not the only thing I have read on this, I am simply using it because it is a good overview and starting point, and because it clearly shows just how easy it would have been for you to learn literally a single thing about this topic, but you chose virulent ignorance instead. I have in fact gone beyond wikipedia by giving you an actual source, and you aren’t even there yet. By failing to even state your position, you have refused to enter the arena of discussing facts.
Now, I did mention the Panama papers, and that was a nod to the way that the rich employ violence against their detractors, and perhaps that was a stretch, but I could make the argument to someone interested. I doubt you are.
The problems the Luddites were protesting are more closely related to the modern problem of Fast Fashion, in which vast quantities of extremely poor quality transient clothing is produced and destroyed every single year. It is an economic, ecological and social disaster that ironically employs many many people in the most brutal shop conditions. The “cheap” clothing you championed as the cause of the “flourishing” is exactly the problem that the Luddites feared, and it has not been good for the planet or for people. The horrendous work conditions of the industrial revolution also led to clothing factories where children were employed to crawl under operating machines and were frequently minced by them. This is the kind of barbaric treatment of human beings that the Luddites were against and that the ruling class had them killed to maintain. This sort of thing still happens today, but in far away countries with poor populations that you don’t see. Capitalism hasn’t resulted in plenty, it has resulted in abject poverty for the vast majority of the world’s population so that a small minority can live in luxurious comfort. I assume you don’t think that’s real capitalism or something, but you’d be wrong about that too.
The term Luddite did not come to have its modern meaning until the 1950’s, at which point anyone who had ever known a Luddite was long dead and they were not able to protest the slander, but popular perception is often given by the ruling class, so we get people like you who apparently go off the vibes of the word you’re familiar with and confuse that for actual knowledge.
The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers who opposed the use of certain types of cost-saving machinery, and often destroyed the machines in clandestine raids. They protested against manufacturers who used machines in “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to replace the skilled labour of workers and drive down wages by producing inferior goods.
The first video is a list and the next few go into detail about individual projects. This is an ongoing series.
The reason you don’t hear about these like you heard about the USSR or the CCP is because they are doing good things and not turning on their own people, so they don’t make good capitalist propaganda, so instead they stay off the radar. That to me means they’re doing the right thing.
There are thousands of projects you don’t hear about because people that aren’t trying to replace the old boss with the new boss aren’t trying to get your attention. They’re doing the work to make an alternative system that doesn’t get crushed by reactionaries.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a CD, a Film, or manual with the instructions to build a spaceship. If you copy it, the original owner doesn’t lose anything. If you don’t copy it, the only one missing something (the experience) is YOU....
That right is something they should not have. Streaming services greenlight shows, get them made, then cancel them after two seasons to prevent artists getting residuals.
Then if they lose popularity they pull them off the site and even the people who worked on them can’t see them anymore. Animators have to rely on piracy just to show people their own portfolio. That’s where respecting copyright leads.
The copyright owner is just whoever fronted the money, and the only reason we’ve decided they “own” anything is because people with money have decided money should be the most important thing in our society.
Google promised a better search experience — now it’s telling us to put glue on our pizza (www.theverge.com)
Arizona accuses Amazon of being a monopoly and deceiving consumers with “dark patterns” (www.theverge.com)
Arizona’s Attorney General, Kris Mayes, filed two lawsuits against Amazon on Wednesday for allegedly engaging in deceptive business practices and maintaining monopoly status. The first lawsuit accuses the company of using dark patterns to keep users from canceling their Amazon Prime subscriptions, violating Arizona’s...
OC What are some essential browser extensions for "quieting down" the internet? (www.staygrounded.online)
Dear server admins, please defederate threads.net. Dear users, ask your server admin to defederate threads.net. (mstdn.social)
Meta just announced that they are trying to integrate Threads with ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.). We need to defederate them if we want to avoid them pushing their crap into fediverse....
The slow death of Twitter is measured in disasters like the Baltimore bridge collapse (www.vox.com)
YouTube is slowing down for users with ad blockers in new wave (9to5google.com)
Debt Crisis: Poorest Nations Owe Trillions in High Interest-Rate World (www.bloomberg.com)
PSYCHOPRULECEPTRULE HAZRULE (slrpnk.net)
description...
Now that DuckDuckGo is out. Give me your search prompts and I'll answer them as best I can. That includes images (based on what I have saved on my PC). So what is it you wish to know or see?
Edit: Due to popular demand FatTony Search servers are down for the time being. but has gone open source just in time (Yes that’s how it works 😡) . You may now get responses from other users. Servers will be back up some time later.
Foreign investors to be slapped with huge penalties for leaving homes vacant (www.abc.net.au)
What is the Legal copyright on a Lemmy Post?
Most instances don’t have a specific copyright in their ToS, which is basically how copyright is handled on corporate social media (Meta/X/Reddit owns license rights to whatever you post on their platform when you click “Agree”). I’ve noticed some people including Copyright notices in posts (mostly to prevent AI use). Is...
Reddit’s Goon Cave Community Has Been Banned (www.404media.co)
Well this is just delightful (lemmy.world)
Would a perfectly flat, tight sail on a boat be more efficient than a sail like we all know?
Okay hear me out and this may sound like the ramblings of a lune but i just thought the following....
The point of racing is to spend the least amount of time doing something you enjoy.
Stellaris gets a DLC about AI that features AI-created voices, director insists it's 'ethical' and 'we're pretty good at exploring dystopian sci-fi and don't want to end up there ourselves' (www.pcgamer.com)
It's Dangerous to be Right when the Government is Wrong (slrpnk.net)
Edit:...
Yes (lemmy.today)
Piracy was NEVER stealing (programming.dev)
It doesn’t matter if it’s a CD, a Film, or manual with the instructions to build a spaceship. If you copy it, the original owner doesn’t lose anything. If you don’t copy it, the only one missing something (the experience) is YOU....