wtf. I’m glad I won the lottery with where I was born. But saying that, it has to be a constant struggle to prevent that dystopia anywhere. Not luck. Were the shots required for visas? Did you look into the price difference getting them at your destination? - more out of curiosity . $200nzd is the highest price I could find for full dose here in NZ - and thats private (not publicly funded). Approx 100usd. Some of your others would be free. I’m guessing you’re not coming to NZ though so not questioning your choice to vax for whats required at destination - sensible. Just the absolute scam world you poor Americans have to live with. We are all headed there if we aren’t careful, and keep our wits.

I’m a non dev and non IT worker but found myself using warp the last year on mac and linux kde for home things and work. I really like it particularly its history per tab and various intuitive usability things like click and drag to select text , copy pasteetc. The login requirement did creep me out, as well as the AI things I’m not using. I don’t trust businesses going in these directions. Anyone recommended another terminal cross platform (not that important i guess) and good for a non uber techie like me?

Edit: apologies I hadn’t seen the earlier comment thread but perhaps my requirement mentions will produce some interesting replies.

A global look at Short form video as the latest trend in mass misinformation campaigns, including which interest groups, or states conduct them and who they contract (from large scale to possibly unwitting small creators) to produce and post it. How it developed from prior trends, and where it might go next. Perhaps not particularly controversial (in the true sense of the word), but geopolitically worth looking at and discussing more in imo. Of course a privacy and security focus on this is very much integral to the issue by default. How the existing business models around the data involved (harvesting , auctioning etc) might play into this already , and in the years to come. As well as how other business is implicated. Good old “Follow the money” I guess .

Thats a job for ‘journalists’ these days.

Me too. Tried twitter way back in the early days of it. Never found it useful. Others did though obviously, which I don’t understand, but they did. What I find interesting is the seeming need to replace it with something similar. Why? Is it like gradually kicking an addiction by switching to something slightly less bad, but not going full cold turkey?

Good thing FB and Insta themselves are skippable.

Yeh it’s a sign-in for a free trial wall. Alternatively

Meanwhile the NZ gov use this as a distraction while they display a disgusting lack of humility, regret, or compassion to the people who will be most affected by this. What an embarrassment. They behave as if this is a minor loss by the All Blacks, while traipsing around the world on trade junkets with smarmy CEO-like abandon. Talk about up ending NZ’s already tenuous reputation in the South Pacific, and with our long disrespected neighbour Samoa. Not enough that this gov are trashing our local environment and services within the country. They really had to cherry pick these trolls out of a sea of moderate response , most likely at the instruction of their PR social media and info strategy overlords. I’m sure the skipper of this vessel is suffering enough without her government (and employer) cynically using her as a political opportunity for distraction.

https://archive.is/2024.10.10-143326/https://www.economist.com/business/2024/10/10/china-is-writing-the-worlds-technology-rules

I think they mean the same thing happens alot in reverse: YT vids about news articles. Not wrong, but whataboutist.

Yeh people learn and it becomes normal which is fine. Ebay is as bizarre to me. Not hate, more a morbid fascination that things so maze-like to navigate can also be successful. Could be semi cultural as well. I’ve noticed this being the way in other US platforms with a similar legacy. I’ve also being (attempting to) subvert tracking for quite a while so maybe that’s working and its less useful as a result lol. I’m lucky in a sense that their corporation isn’t so strong where I live so theres more choice (ironically I may actually have less choice). Its annoying when they have the monopoly on a given product, but it’s also possible just to go without the shiny thing.

Thanks for this. I’ve only used Amazon a few times and was always baffled at the train wreck of its chaotic layout / ux. I had to buy something there once and it was such a process it was like being asked to leave the store before paying. Thought at the time it must be down to legacy and new features being showhorned around ancient web1.0 history, its success being its burden with customers having to learn how to use the thing. Price fixing scam is what I will think of it now, while continuing to avoid it.

I did also and was astounded. More EV brands and retail stores for them than for mobile phones and gadgets in the malls. I counted 14 brands in one mall. Like EVs are a fashion accessory. And I saw car designs for sale and on the steet that looked like what we usually see only as early concept art. not high tier of market either. It is an ultra-competitive race to the bottom , There must be several new factories and brands opening every week, and maybe the same or more shutting down. some of the bells and whistles being thrown in are pretty funny. Little robotic characters ala alexa for your car that sits on the dash with led face responding and moving to commands. half side doors being an LED screen for some reason (mainly to atrract potential buyers in the malls I thought) . The european, tesla and other US evs alongside were very very plain. Whether all of this is a good thing is another matter.

Thanks for letting me know about Zuck’s behaviour in Hawaii . I was unaware, and should be as a person of the pacific. What a disgusting imperialist culture destroyer and pig. As with many first nation cultures, to Polynesians land is sacred and we are a part of it , maybe guardians of it , more so than any possible ownership over it which is a ridiculous nonsensical concept. Was it not enough that he has compromised international democracy with his extremely dubious contributions to humanity. These sociopathic siliconvalley billionaires really are a scourge. This isn’t exclusive to tech though.

As for your overall point, I never particularly admired any corporate characters in tech. All in all I believe the whole sector is overvalued and its importance in life is way over emphasised - the social platforms, and google particularly are overinflated advertising businesses and so of course their self importance has been trumpeted loudly…by themselves and everyone who hitched their giddy advertising budgets to the illusory service provided. Barely as effective as traditional advertising of a century ago. They’ve constructed a panopticon we have trouble looking away from - they even want us to wear goggles to shoe us banners wr cant look away from, to sell us their own useless trinkets.

I believe we should think of the so called tech industry as merely a single component in whatever sector of life it happens to provide a product or service to. Not as a single industry but as a small department of weirdos running say the plumbing (though actual plumbing is arguably more important) with a dingy office in the basement. The cEOs of these are merely the hated bloated bosses of the ones really doing the work. But we should also judge their utility objectively. Sure some aspects are useful in some specific ways. But how useful really? What has the net gain been to humanity of gadget x, or platform Y , or pseudo-sub-industry z? What real energy has it consumed in order to solve what problem(s)? What has the human cost been? They don’t think in these terms but we actual humans should.

By the way I work in a tech area, in a small way. I like to think I speak from an angle of some experience with the way I’ve seen some behave, and the irreverant way some customers treat their ‘vendors’. The aura of the tech world is a cult-like bubble which each of these corporations create for themselves , and fledgling startups clamour for, and when clustered as one concept adds up to a massive bubble of hot stinking gas begging to pop.

Unfortunately concepts of value in our economy rarely match their true usefulness. The market is always correct and self corrects, apparently. I look forward to it, but the actual steps forward can be hard to appreciate with all the noise in that hype filled graph.

Also, and this isn’t exclusive to tech, corporations behave like psychopaths due to their narrow goals , profit being the main one, so the characters who float to the top of this septic system of single minded psychopathy tend to be sociopathic due to what they have needed to do to get there. Perhaps for tech this is more a late stage thing, in contrast to our memories of the romantic early days having been more about scrappy boffins soldering things in their parents garage. Now its about whipping up misconceptions in order to raise copious amounts of (mispent) capital in order to make…a smartphone app based ‘platform’ that provides solutions to problems we don’t have. So long as the pitch had “A.I” in each sentence.

So yeh, that this environment has resulted in some psychos with a disproportionate amount of money (and therefore political clout) is not a surprise.

To varying degrees if we live in democracies, we are all responsible for creating these monsters. It’s our responsibility to do something about it. Such as raising awareness -as you have done, choosing alternatives, thinking about whether a tech option really is necessary in your life (e.g choosing Amazon over your local independent bookstore), in your workplace (if you have any power here: atleast expressing an alternative method, or solution to your colleagues or managers), and holding tech providers to some level of account at the least with your skepticism. And obviously boycotting what you can. Also remaining hyper aware of the scammy nature of much of the so called sector in its business practices.

I never trusted Tom from myspace as a default insta friend, but he now does seem quaint . But the tech industry is not really an industry and it definitely isn’t the world.

Cool thing about this is they could assemble these bundles into parallel live streams we could simply flick between to find what we prefer to watch. If they run into a problem of people flicking away when ads run then just align the ads to run at the same time on each “channel” if I can call them that ?

Great to hear! I’ve perservered despite this as it’s great for me in all other respects.

Yeh theres a danger in that I can see. The Machine is learning from our dissent.

My main prob with viewtube has been its flakey resolution auto or manual selection. The UI with it is weird and i basicially have to randomly click unclick autoselect , and switch between resolutions before it somehow lands on 1080 . Might be my browser and OS combo - macOS librewolf. Hosted on kde locally. Otherwise love it. But I dont use much other than search and watch. I use metube if I want to keep anything.

If your’e telling the deglazers to giveup because we will never stop glazing ourselves then I agree.

Tone deaf mega cringe, or savy meme generation ? Not mutually exclusive I guess, but I’ll keep steering clear of Canva.