you drive a hard bargain

i agree with what you’re saying and i think we’re mostly on the same page here. i just felt it would be worth saying that, from my perspective, the point of the fediverse isn’t to compete with those websites but instead to be an alternative to them. it’s to offer a picture of what social media can be like without dark patterns, extreme surveillance, and constant enshittification. and there is a really comfort in that. it feels really nice to not have to worry about a website or app getting worse every time i use it.

i also feel like the people on here tend to behave more thoughtfully (in general) than people on reddit and other for profit social media websites. and it wouldn’t surprise me if that was in part due to the absence of dark patterns making lemmy feel more relaxed and less high stakes. there’s also a bit of a small town feeling on this website that i kind of like too.

can i be the dog

imagine my surprise at learning this comment came from lemmy.ml

i show you mark zuckerberg

how does elon even have time to play video games if he’s the most busiest and hardcore guy of all time?

maybe they were afraid of bobby tables

same here. as soon as i got the speakers set up i closed the app, never to open it again. i would have done this anyway, since i like to have all my things in one place, but the app certainly didn’t do itself any favors here

i don’t know if any of you lot have experienced the sonos app firsthand, but let me tell you that it is worse than you could possibly imagine. it takes ages to open, has a million buttons, and pretty much all of them are useless. it has a play/pause bar on the bottom of the app that does not go away. if you want to change your speaker settings, that’s hidden away in a menu (within the app) called “system settings”. why would they call it that?

the app makes you type in the wifi password when pairing a new speaker, even if that speaker has the ethernet cable plugged in. the app also doesn’t support certain wifi passwords so i had to change my wifi password before connecting my speaker.

The blog post noted that the new Europe-based nonprofit entity will wholly own the Mastodon GmbH for-profit entity. The organization is in the process of finalizing the place where the new entity will be set up.

could this be cause for concern down the line? i mean this as a genuine question. i don’t really know how these things work. my understanding is some weird non-profit and profit mixture is what led to problems at openAI. but that said, i also know that the people at the company make a difference, and sam altman is very likely much worse than the mastodon CEO. anyways, it would be nice to know more about this relationship between the profit and non profit side of things.

they innovate new ways of performing regulatory capture and new ways of monopolizing industries. rest assured that this is all a good thing somehow

uuhhhhhhh…. ummm…… there’s…. uhhhh….

this is just like what mark zuckerberg said about all of europe having “too much censorship” and “making innovation impossible”. but i guess if germany really cared about being unbiased they would have moved all their institutions to texas by now or something.

i wonder why they chose to name such a troublesome military unit after the guy from despicable me

i think that’s a good hypothesis as well. it’s likely a combination of both. maybe they’re also trying to gain some control over how the dead internet theory comes about (e.g., “our bots vs their bots”)

“what’s your alternative?” the answer is always lemmy am i right guys 😎

while it is no doubt the case that most big tech companies are engaged in perpetual wars of attrition against their users, i can’t help but feel that this AI posters thing is different from the examples you provided. at least in those examples, the users have something to gain from sacrificing their privacy. and the company also stands to gain something as well. (although typically the company stands to gain way more from these exchanges.) but in this case, i’m not really sure how anyone benefits. nobody seems to want to be tricked into talking to an AI, and i don’t see how that would make the company more money. maybe they think it would drive up “engagement” somehow? but that seems like a hard thing to accurately predict. it seems more likely that zuckerberg is convinced that AI is automatically good in any tech company, and this is the most obvious way to shove AI into social media websites. so therefore it must be a good idea somehow.

most tanky positions are indefensible. and yet, they try to defend them anyways.

i find it incredible that despite having access to basically unlimited information about its users, facebook makes stupid decisions that seem almost designed to piss off its users. and then you have situations like this, where facebook was told ahead of time that this decision would make a lot of people angry, and then facebook went and did it anyway only to walk it back a few days later and say it was a mistake. why?