koreth

I think this is a more subtle question than it appears on the surface, especially if you don’t think of it as a one-off.

Whether or not Scientology deserves to be called a “religion,” it’s a safe bet there will be new religions with varying levels of legitimacy popping up in the future. And chances are some of them will have core beliefs that are related to the technology of the day, because it would be weird if that weren’t the case. “Swords” and “plowshares” are technological artifacts, after all.

Leaving aside the specific case of Scientology, the question becomes, how do laws that apply to classes of technology interact with laws that treat religious practices as highly protected activities? We’ve seen this kind of question come up in the context of otherwise illegal drugs that are used in traditional rituals. But religious-tech questions seem like they could have a bunch of unique wrinkles.

Your answer touches on something I can’t really relate to, which may be the key to my lack of understanding: people’s desire to get information in the form of videos rather than text. It just seems so much slower to me. I can skim 50 Google or Yelp reviews of a restaurant in the time it takes to watch a single short video review. I might watch one video along the way if I want a sense of the ambience of the place, or some other information that’s hard to convey well in writing, but that’s it.

It does seem like it may be a generational thing, though. I’ve seen the same trend in my work-related searches: sometimes I search for technical information and instead of a blog post that takes me 30 seconds to digest well enough to tell if it’s even going to answer my question and that I can copy-paste example code from to play with, I get an hourlong YouTube video. This is a relatively new thing that has only become common in the last 5 years or so. I used to think it was purely about monetization (videos pay more than blog posts) but I see people, especially beginners, asking for technical information in video form. To me that’s like saying, “Please answer my question in the least convenient form possible.”

Apparently this is my “kids these days, who can understand them?” topic.

More recently, there’s been a shift to entertainment-based video feeds like TikTok — which is now being used as a primary search engine by a new generation of internet users.

I must be an old fogey because I can’t understand how TikTok would be usable as a primary search engine unless all you ever search for is TikTok videos.

If I’m part of the new generation of Internet users and I want to, say, see the menu of the restaurant where my date is taking me for dinner, or check my favorite band’s discography, or see if the reviews for the latest Netflix show are good, how do I do any of that on TikTok?

Someone please explain how this works, assuming that statement in the article is true.

As a software engineer: the degree to which poorly-conceived product requirements can make my work life a living hell.

SEO is an industry devoted to undermining search engines’ ability to organically surface good content. Good content will still be surfaced on its own, just maybe not quite as quickly.

The “developed or supplied outside the course of a commercial activity” condition is part of why people are up in arms about this. If I’m at work and I run into a bug and submit a patch, my patch was developed in the course of a commercial activity, and thus the project as a whole was partially developed in the course of a commercial activity.

How many major open-source projects have zero contributions from companies?

It also acts as a huge disincentive for companies to open their code at all. If I package up a useful library I wrote at work, and I release it, and some other person downloads it and exposes a vulnerability that is only exploitable if you use the library in a way that I wasn’t originally using it, boom, my company is penalized.

Yes, but much less than I used to. When I don’t have a particular goal in mind and just want to doomscroll a bit, I find myself checking Lemmy first, and only if I run out of things to read, which I usually don’t, do I move on to Reddit.

There are still some niche communities that are active on Reddit and not here. So I do still go over there on purpose for those.

My parents are teachers. In the 1970s, my mom’s school gave her a newfangled “personal computer” to take home for the summer and try to figure out some use for.

7-year-old me was addicted to the thing from day one and my mom barely got a chance to touch it all summer. Out of the box it didn’t do much, but the manuals showed you how to program it to do whatever you wanted to. I read those books cover to cover and inhaled all the other books and magazines on the subject I could find. Thinking up a program from scratch and seeing it do things on its own was unlike any experience I’d ever had.

Coming up on 50 years later, making computers do things is still a joy, I’m pretty good at it, and people pay me money to do it. Can’t complain about how that turned out!

Counterpoint: True Facts is a great series of humorous nature documentaries.

I too was shocked by how much it feels like Apollo and how silky smooth it is. I no longer even care whether or not someone makes a native iOS app for Lemmy.

I think this is about Waze, the mapping/navigation app.

ChatGPT is certainly no good at a lot of aspects of storytelling, but I wonder how much the author played with different prompts.

For example, if I go to GPT-4 and say, “Write a short fantasy story about a group of adventurers who challenge a dragon,” it gives me a bog standard trope-ridden fantasy story. Standard adventuring party goes into cave, fights dragon, kills it, returns with gold.

But then if I say, “Do it again, but avoid using fantasy tropes and cliches,” it generates a much more interesting story. Not sure about the etiquette of pasting big blocks of ChatGPT text into Lemmy comments, but the setting turned from generic medieval Europe into more of a weird steampunk-like environment, and the climax of the story was the characters convincing the dragon that it was hurting people and should stop.

I don’t understand why people are saying this will reduce misinformation. The fringe sites peddling things like genocide denial aren’t news organizations to begin with, so users will still be able to share their content freely. It’ll become harder for other people to counter the misinformation by linking to legitimate news sources.

Wish people wouldn’t do this, though I do understand the motivation. IMO it ends up punishing other Internet users (who are the ones getting value from years-old comment threads) vastly more than it punishes the owners and employees of Reddit, Inc. (who get most of their value from people participating in active discussions and seeing ads along the way).

The end result is that you search for “how to fix a broken curtain rod” on Google and the search results are full of comment threads like

• Anyone know how to fix a broken curtain rod?
  • [deleted]
    • Oh, that’s a good idea. How do you unscrew the end if you do it that way?
      • Hello! I have removed my comment from reddit because I don’t like the way they’re running their company. You can find me on Lemmy.
        • Thanks! That worked.

Reddit still gets the revenue from the ad at the top of the page, so the only person you’ve successfully stiffed is the person who was looking for an answer.