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.
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.
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.
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.
States have had no trouble passing and enforcing IP law that allows companies to get away with this. Reverse engineering would be the norm for closed source anything to the point it would be made irrelevant if companies didn’t have the overwhelming weight of the legal system on their side to shut down anyone who dares try open up access to their designs.
Right to repair is great, but we are fighting against the entire weight of the entrenched ruling class to get it passed. It’s going to take a lot of activism, and even then it’s almost certainly going to be watered down and cater to large corporations when it does pass. We need to keep the pressure on them.
White supremacist gangs are generally privileged enough to afford regular guns. Crackdowns on gun possession have overwhelmingly targeted and been selectively enforced against black and other non-white communities and left wing groups, whereas Kyle Rittenhouse shot three people at a BLM rally then walked right past the cops who didn’t even intercept him, then he was acquitted. The only BLM protestor to shoot someone was basically assassinated by the feds.
There are plenty of problems with guns in the US and I think there are a few regulations around purchasing them that make sense, but this is virtually a non-issue. Printing guns is so time and resource intensive that unless you are arming a militia in a place where the general population has very limited access to guns, it’s not really going to change much.
The one other thing you can do with 3d printing is make full-auto guns and modifications, and those are scary but not really important. Full auto has limited tactical use in squads in pitched warfare. Semi auto will work for 99% of cases, and if the need for full auto is coming up a lot, you’re probably in a position to use your gun-to-get-a-gun. We’re talking about situations where the law has already broken down, like Myanmar.
Now I can understand why the state would be scared of the tech, but I don’t see it helping white supremacists. They already have all the help they need.
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.
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.
On 28 April 2022, Just Stop Oil supporters blocked the entrances to Clacket Lane Services on the M25 by sitting in the road with Just Stop Oil banners. They also decommissioned the petrol pumps by breaking the display glass and covering it with spray paint. This action was taken in support of their demand for the UK government...
This should be a claxon in the ears of the ruling class that they are facing dire consequences in the near future if they don’t change shit like yesterday.
Jury nullification is powerful partly because you need to get a group of 12 strangers together who have been vetted to remove bias, to all unanimously agree to say, in effect, “fuck the law”. The more people realise this is an option, the more it will happen, and the more it happens the more it will become obvious that we are being screwed and our oppressors want it to happen. They should be shitting themselves right now.
Instead nobody’s reporting on it, not even the centrist style conservatives, and the very wealthy have clogged their ears with reactionary rhetoric that will stop them hearing the alarm until it’s far too late.
Rather it was the people using the new system to settle old scores or for personal advancement.
Lenin, Mao, et al look at how many people had gotten into the party entirely for the purpose of abusing their positions for personal gain.
How was that allowed to happen? Did they build a system of oppression that was ripe for takeover by petty tyrants, some of whom became actual, fully fledged tyrants, whilst simultaneously shutting down the mechanisms by which workers could have power over their own lives?
This isn’t about whether Stalin personally gets into heaven, plus the absurd strawman that people think he did anything personally shows a complete lack of systemic thinking, which was ironically one of Marx’s great contributions to political thought. It is about whether the systems we build are liberatory or oppressive.
MLs love reading, don’t they? Oh but wait, that’s anarchism. Go ahead, tell me it’s beneath you and I should read On Authority. I have. It was underwhelming to put it nicely.
And yes, the system they built was on the back of and patterned after the authoritarian monarchist regimes they followed. That’s not a favourable light to put that system in. Was it marginally better than a monarchy? Sure, why is that relevant to anything? We live under neoliberal regimes of which none to my knowledge has never been toppled by an ML revolution.
That ideology is centuries out of date. Anarchists saw its downfall before it started. It’s failed.
Even if you’re combatting some bizarre strawman about absolute dictators, it’s equally bizarre that your response is to attempt to rehabilitate Stalin’s character. That puts you squarely in tankie territory.
Assuming you’re trying to ask what that term means, it’s short for Marxist-Leninist, it’s a polite way of referring to tankies, where you accept their rebranding of what is effectively Stalinism. It was after all Stalin’s term to coopt and puppeteer the legacy of two dead men to give legitimacy to his reign of terror. They will try to tell you there are principled MLs but if they think there is any merit in the concept then they are doing the same kind of historical revisionism that all tankies do.
And you can see this person was in fact clearly trying to defend Stalin, if only indirectly.
Edit: Also look at the username - they’re from lemmy.ml, where the .ml is the Mali country code but in this case it definitely also stands for Marxism-Leninism. It’s a tankie instance.
I gave them the text as published on the anarchist library, but they didn’t seem to appreciate that either. It’s almost like they just don’t want to learn history that isn’t their revisionist version of it.
The frustrating thing is that most of it was CIA propaganda at one point in time, it just happened to also be true, which made it much more effective propaganda. It’s a big gift the USSR gave to anti-communists.
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.
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 :)
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.
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...
The slow death of Twitter is measured in disasters like the Baltimore bridge collapse (www.vox.com)
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....
OC What are some essential browser extensions for "quieting down" the internet? (www.staygrounded.online)
Debt Crisis: Poorest Nations Owe Trillions in High Interest-Rate World (www.bloomberg.com)
PSYCHOPRULECEPTRULE HAZRULE (slrpnk.net)
description...
EVs Could Last Nearly Forever—If Car Companies Let Them (www.theatlantic.com)
YouTube Is Cracking Down on Gun Content, and 3D-Printed Gun Makers Aren't Happy (gizmodo.com)
Foreign investors to be slapped with huge penalties for leaving homes vacant (www.abc.net.au)
YouTube is slowing down for users with ad blockers in new wave (9to5google.com)
Just Stop Oil supporters found not guilty in petrol pump case (juststopoil.org)
On 28 April 2022, Just Stop Oil supporters blocked the entrances to Clacket Lane Services on the M25 by sitting in the road with Just Stop Oil banners. They also decommissioned the petrol pumps by breaking the display glass and covering it with spray paint. This action was taken in support of their demand for the UK government...
International Public Opinion on Climate Change: Household Climate Actions – Adoption and Barriers, 2023 (climatecommunication.yale.edu)
Assist them (lemmy.world)
This meme was inspired by the response to a meme I posted on r/worldjerking (slrpnk.net)
cross-posted from: slrpnk.net/post/10351845...
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)
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....
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....