Screensavers used to save screens, but then the unionized, and now they save you from the drudgery of blank, boring, screens locked by bosses.

That’s gross

404media: “This post is for paid members only” But we’ll sure as hell put ads on it anyway.

Caves of Qud

Absolutely. Reposting from a year ago:

There is a certain strain of open source development that is nearly anti-marketing, as far as I can tell. They choose names like “gimp”, “git”, “frotz”, “borg”, “pooch”, “butt”, “slurm”, “mutt”, “snort”, and “floorp”.

I note this sentiment has a lot in common with Christian millennialist theology and anticipation of end-times.

If only we could add sanctioned Russian propaganda to the sanctions list… (Also: English is weird).

How you judge others is how you judge yourself. Practice being kind in your judgment of others, and you will find it becomes natural to be kind in how you judge yourself.

What you value, praise, attend to in others’ lives is what you value, praise, and eventually attend to in your own life. Be curious about others lives, don’t assume they have it figured out. This will lead to natural curiosity of your own life, and you will find there are many kinds of achievement and each leads to a way to value yourself. (Achievement is not one-dimensional–money & career is only one kind of achievement).

News and discussion, but you start from a chosen community and work towards global connection. Also, no ads, no making you the product, and volunteer-based development and moderation.

“less toxic” can be interpreted in different ways. For example, I don’t always find people on Lemmy to be more open-minded across tribal boundaries. But you can perhaps find your tribe and experience less toxicity that way?

I love your insights, thanks for commenting. I’d just note that in some cases the word “nerd” has grown to mean just about anyone with competence or expertise due to their intrinsic interest & enthusiasm for the subject area. So maybe becoming an “equestrian nerd” or a “construction nerd” makes you immune to overbroad marketing claims in those areas!

I love your observations here, and applaud the good work. A few thoughts:

1. I think the problem is more complex than “switch from platform A to (better) platform B”. The reason for this is that in many ways the reason “platform B” is better (e.g. Mastodon, PeerTube) is that it is creating a forest (ecosystem) rather than a skyscraper (monolith).
2. People have become used to signing up for services at a single site, and this relationship/architecture teaches us something–that there are only two parties, “me” and “the service”. The service is almost always run by a mega corporation.
3. But in terms of human society, this is a very, very strange relationship/architecture, historically. Usually, we are part of a community. And our community is connected to and bridged with other communities. And the communities form larger and larger alliances and nations etc. The internet has “cut out” the community layer, and then fed us a topology and service that makes it look like community (e.g. Discord), as long as we follow the monolith’s rules.
4. Inevitably, like the When We Get Komooted author explains, monolithic corporate apps lose alignment with the needs of their users, and often by design enclose the community and extract value while selling the community out.
5. To avoid this, we need to re-imagine how we relate to our services–we should be thinking first in terms of picking a community, and supporting that community, and making sure our community supports the services we need, and then in terms of connecting our communities to larger and larger alliances and structures.

IMO, this is the only way to re-gain the power that we need so that we can align our services with our natural human needs, and avoid the enclosure, drift, and extraction playbooks that for-profit monoliths execute on.

And BTW I’m not against for-profit companies. I just think we have to sort out what’s best for us and put our “money where our mouth is” in building up strong alternatives.

I wonder what social media does.

This advice seems off-base to me. There is value in LinkedIn connections. But you have to make the connections outside of LinkedIn. Then it amplifies the value of those connections–you can discover that so-and-so knows so-and-so and then ask for introductions.

It also may be industry specific. I’m a software engineer, and I’ve had several employment opportunities come from these connections.

It’s tricky. There is code involved, and the code is open source. There is a neural net involved, and it is released as open weights. The part that is not available is the “input” that went into the training. This seems to be a common way in which models are released as both “open source” and “open weights”, but you wouldn’t necessarily be able to replicate the outcome with $5M or whatever it takes to train the foundation model, since you’d have to guess about what they used as their input training corpus.

Reminds me of Three Felonies a Day

From Hobby to Hero: Linux Powers the Curious

Build a Legacy, not a Lock-In

Join a Movement, not a Marketplace

For the Mavericks and Makers