Yep 100% agree, and it’s not just the US. I don’t want to even say that this is necessarily some kind of capitalist-fascist conscious conspiracy (in the early stages), but in a capitalist society there always is the push to strip the state to the minimum, lower taxes, privatize infrastructure and well, stripping education to the minimum needed to produce workers that perform just well enough for “the market” so they are not too qualified and do not have to be paid too much and are quickly and cheaply available.

Instead of focusing on developing well rounded human beings, education is reduced to a factory of cheap labor. With that comes the intellectual decline. German public schooling is facing a growing crisis as well and soon will get to the abysmal level of what one hears about the US.

Well and if you do that for a generation or two, society is too dumb to vote in their own interests or see through bullshit (which requires a certain foundation with respect to natural and social sciences). And NOW you have opened the door to the really bad actors who abuse the shit out of the weakened society. Which is the point where we are now.

And here we go, we got political from an initially non political discussion… Well, I guess there is some truth to the saying that everything is political, and right now it looks like most of the big problems have the same political cause.

I wonder how much it was manufactured and how much is just the worst of human nature self amplifying. Probably bit of both. It’s just easier to spread hate and fear than make people chill the fuck out and respect each other.

Any human community that tolarates bad behavior and does not sanction it appropriately will eventually fail and degenerate into a pile of shit, i.e. simply implode. The paradox of tolerance. Good social spaces are like gardens, they need to be maintained and weeds need to be removed. Otherwise it happens what happens.

Well I mostly never used any kind of social media for political things until very recently. Just read news on the respective newspaper websites. Maybe that did the trick.

And just wow. Yeah well, some people are just always trying to pick up a useless tribal fight or stir up some drama, or just mess with others i.e. troll…

That’s why good mods are worth their weight in gold.

Just check a sub like /r/askhistorians, they might sometimes appear harsh but they managed to keep that place true to its vision and purpose (accepting only high quality responses by people who know what they are talking about). But sure, that is rather the exception.

Compared to say the Meta networks, reddit always felt to me like a platform where I can still control what I see. The feed is only filled by stuff I actively chose to subscribe to.

Sure it is a part of the problem - it’s the reason I joined Lemmy. And I wonder how long it will take to become the same kind of wasteland of trash. Not sure that the “smaller community and less viral incentives” approach will be enough to keep it more civil than the “offers” by the commercial attention economy.

Just as a reminder, before the internet was privatized, people were on self hosted forums. Some were good places and some were toxic shit holes. Really depends more on the moderation and community than anything else if you ask me.

That said, surely I am distrusting any platform owned by some oligarch to have policy in the interest of the user base.

I managed to be 10 years on reddit in niche hobby and nerd communities and it feels like I lived in some parallel reddit all the time, reading about how toxic and broken it is supposed to be.

Same with YouTube. There are nice channels with less than 100k Views per Video or even just a fraction of it, producing amazing informative videos.

Gotta find the gems in the dirt.

I have a nagging feeling the platform is not or only a part of the problem, but collective human nature is. When enough people join a platform to be a representative sample, you get the representative shittiness of the literally median person on the internet.

This is the way.

In some areas of theory, all the cool stuff happens on https://arxiv.org/ months before they end up being officially published and “paywalled”.

And in my area (theoretical computer science) we mostly publish short versions in conferences and put the full versions with proofs on arxiv. Of course everyone is downloading and using the latter. The rest is just for the “metrics”.

“Turning culture into an expensive amusement park” - made me think of Mark Fishers Capitalist Realism essay. He articulated well how capitalism absorbs everything and sells it back to us as a monetizable commodity, only that its version is a replica, it has no soul, only a form. What remains is an aesthetics, looking close enough to the real thing for a person who has actually no idea. Even “counter-culture” is absorbed and emptied of all content to become just another flavor of the “mainstream”.

AI is the perfect tool for capitalism, because it works in a similar way. A kind philosophical zombie, a parrot that can replicate the buzzwords and mannerisms, one that wants to convince the customers they get a certain value or quality, without truly having it. It’s just as real, meaningful and authentic as green- and rainbow- washed marketing campaigns of huge corporations.

In the previous phase, capitalism absorbed our cultures and values and made a corrupted version into a part of itself, and now it tries to absorb the human soul and thought, to sell it back to us as a service.

I’m not against AI as a technology in principle, I’m no luddite. The problem are those who currently control this power, and what they do with it.

Haha nice bait, which I took to get some actually interesting statistics, well executed !

Here is your comment, you deserve it. Now your post made it to “average”! You’re welcome.

(Was there any correlation between upvote count and the comment-based metrics? That could also be pretty interesting)

Bandcamp, because it is the best place for independent music and there is nothing close to it.

Steam, because they started with non-horrible DRM (compared to other options) and now they are one of the companies that help Linux succeed for gaming (Steam Deck is just a Linux computer with controllers attached, and Proton is awesome for running Windows games on Linux).

My true faith is: don’t be an asshole and be a decent, rational and empathetic human being.

Everything else I may or may not believe does not matter, it’s decoration.

Haha absolutely, I’m also one of the people who always said all this rainbow and green washing is bullshit. As if they ever cared for anything.

Capitalism has no values, except for one: shareholder value. Yesterday they help sending people to concentration camps, today they help saving the world and increasing diversity, yeah, totally convincing.

There is one thing to rely on with capitalism - if you convince people you can make good money with it or it is good for the brand, they will jump onto it and squeeze the shit out of it. An abstract, amoral force, made from a large number of concrete shitty people.

Software developer here.

I only recently switched from vim to VSCode and I refuse to use any editor without vim emulation.

Regular expressions for quick and efficient and precise search and replace, modal editing which allows me to type di" to ‘delete inside current double quotes’ (needs vim-surround plugin), typing 123gg to go to line 123, press % to switch between any pair of marching braces, brackets or parentheses, and all sorts of such efficient goodies.

It’s not only efficient, vi has a whole concept, a philosophy how you can build quick editing commands. It’s not like remembering random shortcuts like Ctrl-C Ctrl-V. Once you understand the language, it becomes second nature and you can translate something you want to do into 5 key strokes which would need 100 otherwise or would involve the mouse and clicking and selecting etc.

I’m not even that good at vim, I’m just using the surface features.

It has very good reasons why every notable editor provides some form of vi editing emulation.