Fun fact; osteo-archeologist and palaeontologist students used to be given thylacine skulls to identify as a hazing ritual. They would usually be misidentified as Canine (fox or domestic dog).
They do have different teeth to Foxes and they are smaller than Wolves but the similarity with Domestic Dogs and Dingos are uncanny!
Convergent evolution at its finest!
Anyone who uses gMail knows (or should know) that their data is being used for commercial purposes. Any business that uses Google.Business or MS Office should also be aware that they are giving away all their corporate secrets, regardless of any “Opt-In”/“Opt-Out” broken promises.
If they get Apple Intelligence into a functional form, (and not an embarrassing hilarious punchline in an anecdote), the will be profiting of my data.
They can claim that it is Opt-In only (until a bug the next software update ‘accidentally’ changes my Opt-out status) and they can Anonymize my data, but that still doesn’t change the fact that they inferred that hey wouldn’t use my data.
At least their user abuse is still less than Mozilla and Google threw out the “Don’t be Evil” motto decades ago…
Is this the same “Opt-In” as keeping Apple Intelligence disabled between software updates?
Apple are haemorrhaging a lot of hard earned goodwill every time they try to move forward with their own AI.
That still doesn’t give them the right to mine the data that their users entrusted to them though a paid service.
It doesn’t matter how anonymised their harvesting is, they had an agreement with their subscribers not to invade their privacy like this.
We are better off with a LLM that doesn’t work than abusing the data entrusted to them by their users.
It won’t be long until the LLM bubble bursts and we all laugh about how stupid we were to think they had any use whatsoever.
I as lucky enough to use Apollo. As soon as it stopped working, Reddit became useless to me.
(Or not useful enough to use their horrendous website, old.reddit website or official app)
The thing about Federation is that one server of a few hundred users can federate with all the other servers of a few hundred units and also other Federated services.
The next thing you know, you have a social network graph of millions of people, on thousands of servers (and not one ad).
Nature is healing!
Can you imagine what we would think if Heads of State discussed banning Twitter back in the day?
Some totalitarian countries did ban Twitter and other social networks years ago as part of their subjugation of their citizens.
Nowadays, banning Xitter (and Bluesky and Facebook/Instagram) would be liberating their citizens.
Pure Hydronium (H3O+) is the most acidic substance. Pure Hydroxide (OH-) is the most caustic oxidising agent.
Dihydrogen monoxide is what you get when you mix the two together.
I am inferring a difference between an algorithm that is based on simple rules, and an algorithm that is constantly being dishonestly modified for commercial, political and financial benefit.
The fact that comments are prioritised by simple rules, an not by some sort of monolithic ALGORITHM, keeps the discussion dynamic.
In sectarian societies, there are community centres, free library’s and non-religious community groups with public spaces.
Even in Capitalistic societies, shopping centres and shopping malls are a place for communities to grow.
The myth that Community requires Region was created by religions so they could more easily control their indoctrinated (just like capitalism).
Honestly, I think is the whole ”First Post” mindset.
When you post a reply on Mastodon, it is more intimate, the only people who see it are the original tooter and anyone who actively seeks more commentary. It is a dialogue between two people, or multiple dialogues between one person and many others.
Lemmy is more like a forum, where everyone can see all comments, right underneath the original post. It is more like an open-table discussion.
It is not that Lemmy is more social, it is just less personal.
I will quite happily pay a reasonable price for the privilege of avoiding ads.
I understand why people block ads, even though they are a a free tier, even if I don’t agree with it.
The fact that the cost of YouTube Premium almost doubled overnight is making me rethink my ethics, when my current subscription is up for renewal, I will be reassessing whether to cease watching YouTube, watch YouTube with ads or determine another way of supporting content creators.
I think that Lemmy does need more of the right exposure.
If you search for any Lemmy content on Google or Duck-Duck-Go, you don’t get any good results. This is probably because most people use Apps or secure browsers that don’t allow tracking.
Maybe Duck-Duck-Go need to have a !bang search modifier for Lemmy. https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
Substitute “Urges” to “Begs”
As evil as Graham Lineham is, I do need to post the parody of these forwarders that was in The IT Crowd.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg