> shunned from international space collaboration
> makes their own space program
> nobody notices

Kinda wild how the west dissociates from China’s space program basically in a modern day space race against everyone else. Imagine how much farther along humanity would be without the paranoid sinophobia. Some For All Mankind type of shit. Instead we’re getting the Mirror Universe Terran Empire.

Ah, there it is. America is angling to make Taiwan irrelevant by stealing chip tech. Feels like I’ve been taking crazy pills as nobody anywhere else talks about this. Taiwan would do well to protect themselves from imperialists. There’s nobody looking out for them except themselves.

Everyone (meaning western discourse) is all giddy as if America is saving Taiwan. Soon as they taken chip making tech, Taiwan becomes irrelevant to America.

“Hello, Mr Biden? Hello, Mr Trump? It’s Taiwan”
“Tai-who? *click*”

Reddit basically has a completely new userbase. It’s not only by age of user. I don’t think people have really appreciated the rate of attrition has been near total. The old userbase of tech savvy STEM college degree holders have effectively abandoned the platform.

They’ve managed to sell the platform on a whole new set of users. So it looks like the site has kept on plugging along. But really reddit has successfully relaunched itself. Based on the idiosyncratic lingo I see most often. The bulk of users came from Facebook. They don’t know the traditional redditisms so they use vernacular from the platforms they’ve migrated from.

Shit like this is why I use the most generic yankee cowboy aliases online.

The “first they came for…” quote is probably more damaging than people realize. They don’t systematically make more different people the problem. Everyone is fair game at all times whenever it’s opportune.

They appropriated /u/borat. It was an inactive account which was removed and given to the producers of the film to use for an AMA when it was released.

spez, kn0thin, and reddit the company as a whole have zero scruples. There are no rules but what they say at any given moment. It’s subject to change at any time.

Influencer is a fancy word for salesman. Instead of going door to door like grandpa did in the old days, they stream directly to your device.

VR has the same problem smartphones and tablets did until the Apple revolution. Consumers don’t care about technical details which nerds get stuck on. The technology simply isn’t there at the moment.

Right now VR is and will remain for bespoke applications. It will remain so for many iterations of technological advancement until miniaturization beyond anything anyone can ever dream of right now. The technologically inclined can reason about relatively insignificant details like transistor count or whatever. Consumers don’t care. Just like they didn’t care about tablets or even touch screen devices in general even though commercial products existed long before the iPad and iPhone. Nobody gives a shit about technical details. The final product from a layman user perspective is all that matters. Jobs knew this was the ultimate goal. The rest of the tech industry continues to struggle with internalizing it.

Even if they scrimp and save to produce a pleb model. It’s still just a bespoke device. A glorified screen that might have a few neat uses. People will then put it aside and forget about it.

This is the same kind of framing Google used when they were considered the little guy on your side as opposed to big evil corp.

For some reason I memory holed the first distro I used. There’s only vague recollection. I think it was SUSE or something. When Ubuntu came around I tried Linux again. That’s when I started to get the hang of things.

The internet had a social contract. The reason people put effort into brain dumping good posts is because the internet was a global collaborative knowledge base for everybody.

Of course there were always capitalists who sought to privatize and profit from resources. The source materials were generally part of the big giant digital continuum of knowledge. For the parts that weren’t there we’re anarchists who sought to free that knowledge for anyone who wanted to access it.

AI is bringing about the end of all this as platforms are locking down everything. Old boards and forums had already been shuttering for years as social media was centralizing everything around a few platforms. Now those few platforms are being swallowed up by AI where the collective knowledge of humanity is being put behind paywalls. People no longer want to work directly for the profit of private companies.

Capitalists can only see dollar signs. They care not for the geological epoch scale forces of nature required to form petroleum. All that matters is can it all be sold and how quickly. Nor do they care for environmental damages they cause. In the same way the AI data mining do not care for the digital ecological disaster they are causing.

More over it’s a thought terminating cliche when someone says, “<thing> existed before so why’s it suddenly a problem?”. It seems to be yet another out of the bag of rhetorical tricks that wipes the slate of discourse clean. As if all the arguments against it suddenly need to be explained as if none of it had any validity. Not only that but the OPs are often seemingly disingenuously naive. It provides the OP with a blank slate to continually “just ask questions”. Where every response is “but why?” which forces their interlocutors to keep on elaborating in excruciating detail to the point where they give up trying to explain minutiae. Thus the OP can conclude by default they were correct that it’s not a problem after all because they declare nobody has provided them with answers to their satisfaction.

They talk as if they’re protecting our privacy when it’s really a global surveillance net. The spin doctoring is insane.

Maybe instead of Torvalds taking lessons on how to be less of an asshole, he should be teaching developers how to be more like him.

The world needed the open internet to bootstrap the digital revolution. It wasn’t possible without the sum of humanity working altruistically to build the Library of Alexandria of software. No private entity could have possibly done it. It truly is an under appreciated marvel of the late-20th/early-21st century. FOSS contains the knowledge of software that runs the world. Now that such a thing exists I could totally see organizations (loosely speaking) wanting to conquer or ransack it. It’s quite clear by now there’s faction of tech with a tyrannical bent. I’d put them whoever they might be exactly as possible culprits.

Google hasn’t been dogfooding in a long time have they? I wonder what products Googlers use.

The writings been on the all for a long time. Public trackers are as good as dead. People have held on to a cocky attitude that there will always be somebody to take up the mantle but that hasn’t been true in so long. Anti-piracy has been winning by war of attrition.

The interest in bittorrent usage has been on a gradual decline for good decade at least. Try looking for some recent shows these days and you’ll be hard pressed to find many seeders for even popular ones. You’ll still be able to download it eventually but it’s a long way down from the heyday when obscure content was highly available.

These days everyone has streaming subscriptions or is logging in with someones account. The dwindling number of torrenters will download and watch relatively soon after release. Then the torrent dies real quick.

I’m pretty sure to much of the younger generations piracy means getting content from pirate streaming sites more than anything. The decline of PC usage has got to be a big factor too. There just isn’t anymore nerd culture of your PC being your main device much less leaving it running 24/7 with a torrent client. I bet soon enough as gen alpha comes of age, bittorrent will be a forgotten technology of the ancients.

Running their mouths on Discord. Using Patreon to profit from (not) piracy (but everyone knows it is). Reckless display of hubris.

The calamity of another great war may not be nuclear weapons but weaponized ad tech. Maybe then will the average person comprehend the gravity of the situation we live in right now. Maybe it will be so horrifying that no conventional weapon of mass destruction would be needed to cause a digital dark age as people throw away these privacy nightmare devices.

I don’t think this is going to tank like everyone says. Those that hold that opinion are too heavily basing this on personal feelings toward the platform. Reddit isn’t geared toward those individuals anymore. They successfully pivot the platform towards the broad swath of social media users. The market will be pricing reddit based on this. Not whether or not you personally think it’s still a site worth using. The more opinionated geek crowd was never profitable and reddit inc doesn’t care about them.

At this point social media users have grown so weary of their main platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Enough to have mass adopted reddit especially during the pandemic years. Reddit has been capitalizing on that to give people something that seems fresh to them. For all your own years of baggage you personally hold over reddit, the broad market of social media users do not care. They just want their big multi-forum app to entertain them.

The market will not price reddit based on your personal idpol issues with the site. Of which everybody across the spectrum seems to have some sort of stick up their ass. Reddit has survived all those “reddit moments” over the past decades. The platform has actually proven incredibly resilient. The nature of reddit is that it isn’t any common identity anyone can point to really. There is so much representation across the board. Users hate other parts of reddit rather than reddit itself.

The big social platforms have consolidated power over the internet. There’s no competitors. reddit being the forgotten stepchild is having its time in the spotlight right now. The fediverse ecosystem is too raw and too technical for the casual user right now.

The company basically has to keep mods placated to keep on keeping the lights on. They did survive the API protest. I think to them that was actually a litmus test for the IPO. So far we have seen there is no shortage of sycophants lined up. Subreddits are valuable and there has been and will always be those who want to be internet feudal lord.

A lot of people do take issue with reddit but overall the userbase they are selling, that broad social media userbase, they did not care about such issues as the API whatever gabagool. They don’t even know what an aye pee eye is. They just wanted their app to go back to normal. And it did. And reddit resumed operation as normal.

That isn’t unpopular opinion unfortunately. Otherwise the world wouldn’t the way that it is right now. We live in a surveillance apparatus that shapes our behavior. Nobody really cares except for the fringes of society.

If you poll people if they care about their privacy of course they will say yes. That is a rather superficial question. When you start polling in meaningful manner such as the uses of personal data the more the opinions become mixed. Some people really do think tracking and ads can provide them useful services. Such a rapacious form of capitalism is the prevailing mode of our time.

I think to some people the concepts of behavioral modification is too sci-fi to be believable. The topic sounds too much like ramblings of a conspiracy nutter about mind control. For others probably they think they’re smarter than psychological conditioning.