Technology

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5592397

Forty years ago, Richard Stallman announced the plan to develop the GNU operating system, which would be entirely composed of free software. The existence of a free operating system would enable people to operate their computers in freedom, throwing off the power of the developers of nonfree software. The GNU Project has also built the global free software movement.

The app was not very good but it was pretty lightweight at least, and had no ads. Sad to see it go.

Now this YouTube Music Podcasts thing seems a bit off to me. It's not clear from the description if the podcasts are coming straight from RSS feeds like other, normal podcast players or if hosts have to upload them to the YouTube system.

If it's the former, I don't see why anybody would bother with the app since there are many adless alternatives to YouTube (podbean and antennapod are pretty neat), and at most Google would only get a little extra bit of interest data for said ads.

But if it's the latter this means that they are trying to do with podcasting what they did to music, attempting to consolidate a single big hub for it (regardless of whether the authors consent) and creating their own new chokepoint. A lot of people already post other people's podcasts on YouTube with dubious permission.

If successful, that'll be yet another medium completely enveloped by the Google ad industry. I would like to pretend people would be too angry at midroll ads in their history podcasts, but the boiled frog is mush at this point.

It's kinda funny because I just watched a Doctorow interview from a couple years back where he talked about this exact thing happening. Let's see how it plays out.

Edit: apparently it is direct uploads only, but Google promised it'll have RSS feeds next year. Might as well pirate all those shitty "2 bros talking" dead podcasts for some dollar.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5486771

We did an analysis of the Google antitrust trial. Last week, over half of the trial was held behind closed doors because the judge, Amit Mehta, is deferring to Google on the need for secrecy.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5431344

The enshittification of the internet follows a predictable trajectory: first, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. It doesn't have to be this way. Enshittification occurs when companies gobble each other up in an orgy of mergers and acquisitions, reducing the internet to "five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four" (credit to Tom Eastman!), which lets them endlessly tweak their back-ends to continue to shift value from users and business-customers to themselves. The government gets in on the act by banning tweaking by users - reverse-engineering, scraping, bots and other user-side self-help measures - leaving users helpless before the march of enshittification. We don't have to accept this! Disenshittifying the internet will require antitrust, limits on corporate tweaking - through privacy laws and other protections - and aggressive self-help measures from alternative app stores to ad blockers and beyond!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5400607

This is a classic case of tragedy of the commons, where a common resource is harmed by the profit interests of individuals. The traditional example of this is a public field that cattle can graze upon. Without any limits, individual cattle owners have an incentive to overgraze the land, destroying its value to everybody.

We have commons on the internet, too. Despite all of its toxic corners, it is still full of vibrant portions that serve the public good — places like Wikipedia and Reddit forums, where volunteers often share knowledge in good faith and work hard to keep bad actors at bay.

But these commons are now being overgrazed by rapacious tech companies that seek to feed all of the human wisdom, expertise, humor, anecdotes and advice they find in these places into their for-profit A.I. systems.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5323962

The Grift Shift is a new paradigm of debating technologies within a society that is based a lot less on the actual realistic use cases or properties of a certain technology but a surface level fascination with technologies but even more their narratives of future deliverance. Within the Grift Shift paradigm the topics and technologies addressed are mere material for public personalities to continuously claim expertise and “thought leadership” in every cycle of the shift regardless of what specific technologies are being talked about.

5.10 HiP:/ 当你们喷人家副业手机贵不如苹果的时候，人家的主业基站早都已经干到珠穆朗玛峰。# 华为 # 支持华为 # 5g # 华为珠穆朗玛基站  https://v.douyin.com/iemKQXto/ 复制此链接，打开Dou音搜索，直接观看视频！

5.10 HiP:/ When you criticize that their sideline mobile phones are not as expensive as Apple, their main base stations have already reached Mount Everest. # Huawei # Support Huawei # 5g # Huawei Everest Base Station https://v.douyin.com/iemKQXto/ Copy this link, open Douyin search, and watch the video directly!

Thoughts on this video?

I thought it was an interesting read. It's a very Pollyannish piece about the future where AI is somehow able to enable a workforce productivity revolution to save the American economy from its declining labor force.

But in the meantime they make the argument based on some quantitative economic work that in the last few years, growth in employment has slowed because automation is displacing many more workers than new jobs are being created from the automation. They even admit that this is mostly achieved by shoveling costs onto the consumer. The self-awareness is wild.

Happened a while ago but I didn't see people talking about it.

It'll even feature VS Code extensions so you can debug your copilot bugs you don't understand by posting generated prompts on Stack Overflow.

The video demonstration is also pretty funny, apparently CEOs think programmers don't know how to use search engines.

I've been looking into getting some freelance gig to help paying rent, but a lot of the websites look like those YouTube ad scams, promising "elite jobs" or other nonsense, and rely too much on building fake résumés. Stuff like Turing or even LinkedIn now. Anybody know any less terrible ones on an international level?

Due to personal reasons I can't really get a full-time job right now and don't even need that much money so low pay is alright for the time being so long as the workload is also low. I also don't have much "official" job experience, so "AI" CV readers will probably discard me really quickly despite me being in the field for a long time now.

Quite frankly, I never expected to see a fusion reactor became operational in our country for at least another decade. Such cooperation is practically unimaginable with any Western countries. The best we usually get is to take a few look at their own reactor, plus a few notes.

I might start a project to teach a couple of non-tech people how to work with computers at some point. I'd love to hook them up with Linux and libre/open office but the pragmatical reality is that they're gonna need the Windows know-how for employment reasons at least at first.

Problem with that is that Windows is expensive (only in hardware. who buys Microsoft software?). They're bloated and require progressively more advanced hardware to do the same thing they've done in the 90s. I'm trying to come up with ways to reduce costs to work with minimal hardware but my experience on that is only on the Linux front.

Does anybody have any experience with something like that, for example running some cracked Windows 7/XP, that could help?

I am hearing chatter that the ml domain has returned to Mali, which has an obvious impact on lemmygrad. Since lemmygrad is still working, is it not as big a deal as some are making it out to be?

I have this 11 year old oddly resistant Pentium laptop and I'm thinking of turning it into a reading/light-programming tool. It used to run great back in the day but modern software has gotten so bloated that it can barely run GNOME with Firefox, so I was thinking of sticking to command line only. Is there anything specific I should look into?

In specific I mainly only want to be able to download and read mdbooks in the terminal, probably using archlinux32 as the OS (or maybe LFS?). Captcha abuse and all that javascript already ruined browsing with Lynx so I have little hopes of actually browsing the web. I also intend to get a new battery as it only lasts 1-2 hours nowadays. Any other 32bit/tty-only customisation guides are also welcome.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/941245

I have been interested in permaculture as well as ecologically sustainable computing, and I have finally found a community and concept that ties these two together. I was just browsing Gemini capsules (which you need a compatible web browser for), and I came across this: gemini://sol.cities.yesterweb.org/

Which led me to their http website: https://solflo.neocities.org/

On their about page, they recommend a permacomputing website here: https://compudanzas.net/permacomputing.html

Which contained a link to the Permacomputing wiki (which this post directs to) and a web page from Ville-Matias "Viznut" Heikkilä that I am currently reading: http://viznut.fi/texts-en/permacomputing.html

I hope this is a relevant community to share this. There's not really a permaculture, sustainability, or ~~general computing~~ (just realized there is a technology community, I will crosspost there) community on Lemmygrad that I could find at the moment, but I wanted to share this with my fellow comrades here.

Just another example of corporations attempting to co-opt instances of community building for eventual profit. So you know, capitalism.

I am unfortunately not very tech-savvy(I’m better at it than my parents lol but that’s not saying much) but I would like to know more(just a bit at a time, not like my friends in middle school who built their own PCs which is apparently kinda common among tech/gaming hobbyists with a bit of money but I was absolutely blown away). When I was in HS, there was the whole Ajit Pai thing and talk about Net Neutrality. It quickly blew over and people didn’t talk about it much. Basically TL;DR What is it? How does it differentiate from not having net neutrality and what are Marxist opinions on it?

Does Musk gain anything for making Mastodon such a good alternative?