Dave.

There was a point, about 10-12 years ago now, where The Algorithm™ took over social media entirely.

If you were around before that, you would have noticed the shift. Your friend’s comments and posts started to get intermixed with “other stuff” , and eventually you could scroll endlessly and not see anything from your direct friends, or friends of friends. Forever.

What decided what you could see? Why, The Algorithm™ , of course. So, at that point right there, that’s when a direct and consistently biased feed of someone else’s opinion about what you wanted to see got pumped into people’s brains. And you can bet it’s going to be designed to be handing out the most engaging things that it can find for you, to keep you scrolling away on their platform. But it doesn’t matter a fuck if what its handing out i’s mentally harmful to you personally, as long as you’re engaged.

And just like schoolkids in the USA reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, reinforcement of whatever The Algorithm™ wants (simply: more engagement) becomes pretty trivial when it’s crammed into your head consistently from a young age. Lacking any other reference points, children are the ones with the least amount of defenses against all of that shite.

These kinds of laws worldwide are trying to stop that kind of thing from happening, because they can’t stop the source directly. Social media companies hold too much sway over the population and the economy now, it would be political suicide to try and go toe to toe with them.

In my opinion, The Algorithm™ as it stands now is a cancer that needs to be cut out of social media by any means possible. Whether there’s anything left remaining after that is debatable.

the pursuit of fancy graphics just doesn’t make sense anymore

Their assertion is that fancy graphics doesn’t necessarily equal good gameplay, and the major industry players are focused on ever-increasing frame rates instead of game quality.

Nobody cares if your game is fully immersive and rendered down to the atomic scale if it is boring or the game mechanics are shite. Sure you can wander around and look at stuff and gasp at the physics, but unless the game is titled “Look around and enjoy it” , that’s not the point.

the killswitch is in about:config

Ah yes, the easiest place to put a kill switch for the average user, as opposed to the complexity of a toggle in settings.

If you read the phrasing carefully it’s quite clear that it will be doing things to the codebase, just “with oversight”.

How much oversight? Not sure, just some assurances that there will be oversight.

Vibe coding is essentially just a different phrase for that.

So, after sifting through all the other breathless articles from their website it seems that they’re going to :

• Use a LLM to attempt to sort out their documentation.
• Have a chatbot trained on the docs so you can ask it questions and possibly get coherent answers.
• Some sort of vague thing where the LLM provides guidance and suggestions on improvements to the codebase.

Lots of reassurance that they’re not going to let it do vibe coding but to be honest, they doth protest a little too much methinks.

entirely separate and much more sophisticated technology

Or some math nerd will come up with an algorithm for general AI that is embarrassingly simple, and before you know it the “but can it run Doom?” crowd are implementing AI in toasters and watching them have existential crises for the lulz.

This is entirely the wrong community for this answer, but I’ve used the pro version of Textra for 10 years now. One time payment (10 years ago), updates every few months, lots of features, but they don’t get in your way if you don’t need them.

The main feature I use is “delay send for 5 seconds” to allow me to catch all my spelling and grammatical errors after I hit send , but the rest of the UI is pretty well thought out.

One of the very few commercial Android apps that I’d recommend to someone.

Fossify Messages is your trusted messaging companion

I hate this kind of advertising language.

Don’t sell this as some fait accompli , done deal thing. It’s not anything to me at the moment. It doesn’t need to be my “messaging companion”. It needs to be a program, that I use to send and receive SMS/MMS messages. That’s it.

And “trusted”? I’ll be the judge of that.

Posts in linux@lemmy.ml are on average about 4 or 5 hours apart. I think we can squeeze these kinds of posts in amidst the hustle and bustle in here.

It looks like your drive is going offline randomly, or at least, when it warms up a little. All the IO errors look like various subsystems trying to write to something that’s not there anymore, which is why there’s nothing visible in the logs when you look later.

Could be the drive, could be the drive controller on the motherboard, could be just that your nvme drive just needs to be taken out of its slot and reseated, could be something weird in your BIOS setup that’s causing mayhem (bus timings, etc).

Personally I’d reseat your drive in its slot first and go from there.

Whatever you setup, also do a reverse ssh connection back to a PC of yours and forward ports for SSH and VNC-or-similar to local ports on your PC.

That way if it still boots you’ve got a way to fix it remotely and with reverse ssh they don’t have to do anything with port forwarding on their end.

I found with my QNAP NAS that even just sitting the case on a piece of styrofoam made it considerably quieter. A lot of vibration gets transmitted through the feet and whatever it sits on gets turned into a sounding board.

Does anyone actually hate systemd?

It’s a little too monolithic and kitchen-sink-including for my liking. It doesn’t feel like the “do one thing and do it well” style, it has a pretty large attack surface as a result.

Oh, and binary log files.

The Apples and Googles and Microsofts of the world are all about offering cloud services to hold your precious data, for what is essentially “free” to the end user. Push you into their services with dark patterns, make it a pain in the ass to do without them, join the cloud, it’s awesome.

Unfortunately all that comes with a catch - when automated services fail, and self-service solutions fail to resolve it, you have zero chance or ability to contact a real live human who can apply reason and judgement to sort out the issue. You and all your data are basically fucked at that point.

showed the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’” had declined over the past two years, from 22 to 17 percent on Facebook and from 11 to 7 percent on Instagram.

This is ENTIRELY because of Meta’s content algorithms that buried the content from everyone’s friends under a torrent of shit. It’s pretty disingenuous for the company that controls that algorithm to present this as some inevitable fait accompli, something out of their hands, oh well.

But of course Meta was terrified of people just viewing all their friend’s posts and then logging off for the day because, as everyone knows, line must always go up.

Are you familiar with https://old.reddit.com/

How much longer do you think Reddit will keep an option that doesn’t maximise end user engagement metrics?

“Why do people do X, when in my opinion if you disregard the two top reasons for doing X, it’s pointless? Prove to me that it would be better!?”

Again,

Ha! Welcome to corporate

There is a catchphrase in corporate - “Minimum viable product” and it means just that, memory leaks and all.

They aim to actively deorbit starlink sats.

(Edit: they keep a small amount of propellant in reserve for the initial deorbit burn, and then position the solar array to give maximum drag which hastens things considerably)

As far as I know, apart from the first few batches, the “production run” of sats has a pretty low failure rate and are proactively sent to their demise.

People don’t just leave leaking apps out there for consumption.

Ha! Welcome to corporate, where vendors sell you software and say that the hardware has to have 128GB of ram and when you poke around a bit you discover a single JVM with constantly growing memory usage with a script that restarts it every time it runs out of resources.

AND a log file that describes - in typical Java excruciating detail - the precise lines in each module where the devs allocated resources but didn’t free them. About 40 times a second.