whofearsthenight

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 139 points 11 months ago

"I want you to know that I don't like nazis. But I am fine platforming them and profiting from them. Now here is some bullshit about silencing 'ideas.'"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

I mean, Disney is run by adults, so I suspect they're sitting over there watching Elon punch himself in the balls and laughing about it.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

And, if Elon had a real board, this probably would have already happened. This is a perfect example of why. What problem has Disney caused Tesla that they could possibly articulate to a customer that would justify this move and not cost them good will if nothing else, and sales likely especially as this gets a ton of coverage? "Yes, I understand your frustration, and yes I can hear your kid screaming in the background about not being able to watch Frozen while you're stuck charging. But you see, sir/madame, our CEO has a very, and I really have to make sure I state this correctly, but very tiny penis. It's so small, just constantly peeing on his balls (which are also very small.) We here at Tesla let him compensate for this by making the product worse for you, our paying customers. Anyway, can I interest you in a CyberTruck? Please? We've only sold 3 and my family needs to eat."

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Pretty sure they can only be used when parked like when you're charging. Even at a super charger, it's going to take 20-30 minutes to get back on the road.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Disagree entirely.

For one, Meta has diversified enough that it's going to be nearly impossible for them to pull a MySpace. They have Insta, Facebook (blue app) and WhatsApp with a billion+ users each. Even Threads on its own is probably sustainable enough to carry them for a decade, and though far, far down the list, they've branched into other business like with the Quest. Except maybe pixelfed, there isn't really even a direct competitor (other than just the vague "social media") to Meta's properties.

Second, I don't think this is any indicator that Meta views the fedi as a threat. Had they, they probably would have just simply tried to buy their way in somewhere, as they did with Instagram and WhatsApp (this is definitely their MO, Facebook is the only true Meta product.) Further, I am not even sure how so many are making the case that the fediverse is somehow inevitable. Projects don't succeed on pure ideology, and in particular with social media not only do you have to do the technicals right including building a product that users actually want to use, you also have to get the right combination of deliberate community building and sheer luck to get it to stick. Already, the entire point of the fediverse is at odds with how the majority of people want to use social media. With fediverse stuff, you're expected to curate and deliberately shape your experience. I've found more use for blocks and mutes on Lemmy, which is ostensibly the smallest social media site I've ever used, and by a large margin. The default these days for most people are Instagram and TikTok - just open the app and watch whatever is served up.

So we're basically starting at a point that the fediverse is offering a niche product with technical hurdles (which, are very small, but it doesn't take much) for users to even get on, they're going to have to spend a decent amount of time to getting to a usable product, find out they joined the wrong instance and rebuild that, and the communities seem to be made up of the gotcha police half of the time. And then there are just the pure numbers. Even with multiple external exogenous events (like reddit had with Digg, for example) from direct analogues to Lemmy and Mastodon, Lemmy is barely growing and Mastodon probably gained about as many users last month as Threads did while I was writing this.

This whole debate on the fediverse is very "For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day in your life, but for me? It was Tuesday." The fediverse, for its part, couldn't be a better stooge for Meta at the moment. They can say to regulators "look at us, we're open" and then watch as the fedi preemptively blocks millions of users from an introduction to the fedi.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Serious question: how?

Second question: why?

What are the mechanics by which they are going extend or extinguish the fediverse and how would they do that from a technical standpoint? Second, why when the entire fediverse with years of time behind it is a rounding error compared to a product they launched like 6 months ago. Why does Meta give a tiny shit about the fedi compared to TikTok, for example?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago (7 children)

So Threads, which is has 140+ million users and has consistently grown since launch without federation is worried about "getting enough users" from the fediverse, which has less than 10 million?

Fedi users are also about a bajillion times less likely to migrate to a Meta product than the other way around. There was the opportunity to catch some people and help grow the fediverse, but between this and the mastodon HOA (pushes glasses umm excuse me you forgot to put a CW warning on your post about flowers a flower killed my dog when I was five and this is very problematic trauma you're causing and your alt-text should be at least 3 paragraphs and include a bibliography) it's likely the fediverse just did what it needed to ensure it stays a niche for like 3 audiences and that more people are stuck with the corpos if they want content that's not about being a communist or using linux.

Anyway, this is a step for Meta to avoid regulatory scrutiny. Everyone keeps saying how Meta is going to destroy the fedi (don't worry, we'll take care of it for them) but no one is saying how. For example, they cut us off? So what? We're cut off right now.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Ok, I'm sorry but this comment and this thread is just all over the place.

Beeper wasn’t doing MiTM attacks. They weren’t hijacking messages.

That we know of. Oh, and they're literally a man in the middle, someone the user shouldn't expect is in between the data they're sending. okay, I'll give you the middle is squishy here because it's really when it's decrypted on the client, but still...

They functioned and behaved as a legitimate end point.

Which, they weren't. They were spoofing credentials and accessing a system without authorization from the system owner. It doesn't matter if Apple left a hole in the system. Hell, they could have set the password to be '12345' it's still probably a crime, at least, based on this list of crimes:

having knowingly accessed a computer without authorization or exceeding authorized access

The whole thing basically reiterates over and over that just because you technically have access, that doesn't mean you are permitted.

While I agree Apple should have some control over their network.

Okay, makes sense.

Which they clearly don’t in any way that matters.

How many iMessage breaches has Apple had?

The controll they’re exerting shouldn’t be allowed.

The "control" is discovering that someone else made a copy of the key to their locks. If i told you that I now have a copy of the key to your house (but trust me bro I'm only going to use it like you would which means using your shit and and selling your food to others) oh and that now basically anyone has a copy to the key to your house, would you change the locks?

As long as beeper were behaving, which they were.

Which they were?! They literally are using fake credentials, accessing a system without authorization, using the infrastructure including the real costs of said infrastructure.

Secure messages are sent and received from all manner of platforms regularly without issue. No Apple required

Welp, you've just provided the closing arguments for Apple's lawyers and any sort of monopoly concern.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago

Monopoly on what?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

So it's felt like this to me basically since I became an adult. For one, I work in an industry where the holidays mean nothing. And two, now I have adult shit to do, so there isn't a ton of time to just sit around baking and watching Christmas specials and what not. Also can't really stand the consumerist side of things and while I do like giving gifts as a thing, I don't like the idea of "just buy some shit" or "whoever gets the most presents wins."

Now all that said, when I think back to what used to make the holidays special for me, I realized that was adults deliberately making the holidays special. And the shitty thing about being an adult (unless your SO is like, from the Clause family) is that you kind of have to do that for yourself, and you're probably going to have to do boring adult shit to make that happen. Like, you might literally be putting something like "Bake cookies/Watch 'The Grinch'" into your calendar. There is a lot of little things you can do as well - play some music, get some scented candles, stick a bowl of decorative pinecones out, etc.

I think this also helps a lot with other people, or in my case, my kids. I don't have a ton of friends (I'm very much a person with a small circle, but all people i know I can call if i need help moving if that makes sense) but we do some small get togethers. With my kids, I try to do more of the things that make things feel special for them. Lights on the house I could take or leave (back to being lazy) but I do my best and I put them up, even though it was just a few days ago because that was the first day that wasn't pouring where I was at home when it was light out. I make it a point to watch some Christmas movies (and let the kids come to a consensus on which) and bake some cookies or whatever. We usually go every year to that neighborhood where every house has cool lights, even if that is an hour drive away. Lots of little things like that.

Anyway, I feel like the holidays are very much a "fake it til you make it" scenario. I tend to think about it like "what do I remember that I liked about holidays" when I was a kid, and then force myself to do those things. What I've generally found is that there are definitely times I've regretted not doing anything like that, but I never regret when I forced myself to do something like this, and I rarely remember the "forced" part.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

How is that not false advertising? Why should companies be allowed to magic up a fake example of their product actually working, and sell that to customers, when the real product doesn’t actually work yet?

For Apple, we can stop right here, the product worked as described. Apple did the demo, and then released the things they said they would in the time they said they would.

It’s like the Tesla “robot” that was clearly a person in a weird suit. Why are they allowed to advertise things that functionally don’t exist? Why are they allowed to sell unfinished products with promise they may one day be finished (cough full self driving cough)?

Snake oil salesman in the dictionary should just be updated to a picture of Elon Musk. Elon has a long track record of saying shit and not doing it, whether that's full self driving, cybertruck (well, that finally came out), solving world hunger, etc.

I mean holy fuck it’s like Beeper offering paid access to a service that allows Android and PC users to use iMessage, but Apple keeps breaking each new iteration every few days… Like there was no long-term plan to make sure that the service would work long-term before asking people to pay for it.

Yeah, I totally agree.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

Android, Windows Phone (the “metro” rewrite from scratch - not the WinCE one), Palm WebOS, etc were all well and truly in development and close to launch and most of them were being developed in the open. Apple who was cutting corners everywhere to leapfrog those products. It took Apple just four years to go from initial planning to a shipping product.

This is ranges from just misleading to factually wrong. WebOS, for example, didn't launch until 2009, 2 years after the iPhone demo in question.

Windows Phone:

In 2008, Microsoft reorganized the Windows Mobile group and started work on a new mobile operating system.

Android:

An early prototype had a close resemblance to a BlackBerry phone, with no touchscreen and a physical QWERTY keyboard, but the arrival of 2007's Apple iPhone meant that Android "had to go back to the drawing board".

For ARM, I have to go with a "sort of?" Apple has been tied to ARM 80's so that's correct, but my phone prior to the first iPhone was one of these bad boys: the Palm Treo. It used a Intel PXA270 312 MHz. In my use, the Treo had better battery life, though admittedly that may just be because I rarely even tried to do things like use the internet on it because it was such a jank experience, so my primary use was planner types of things, texts, and since it was 2005-6, phone calls.

Anyway, back to the poster you responded to:

What competition? At that point it was BlackBerry and WinCE. Oh, and PalmPilot. [sic: by this point they had dropped "Pilot" which was actually a device type, not a company/brand.]

The actual timeline makes it pretty clear that this comment is almost objectively correct. However, even this is not correct because Apple didn't set out to compete with what we considered "smartphones":

He said Apple had set the goal of taking 1 percent of the world market for cellphones by the end of 2008. That may seem small, but with a billion handsets sold last year worldwide, that would mean 10 million iPhones — a healthy supplement to the 39 million iPods that Apple sold last year.

Bold added for emphasis.

Or, you can hear it straight from the horse's mouth: Jobs at the original iPhone keynote.

Anyway, I was alive for all of this, iPhone 10000% caught literally everyone flatfooted.

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