Rottcodd

What “entitlement?”

I don’t expect anyone to start a web site or service or to give me or anyone else access to it at all, much less for free.

I’m just making the very narrow point that when a company chooses to do all of that, and manages to make enough money to build a plush corporate headquarters on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet and pay its executives millions or even tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, then starts crying about not making enough money, that’s self-evident bullshit.

If anybody’s acting"entitled" in that scenario, it’s the greedy corporate weasels who spend billions on their own privilege, then expect us to cover their asses when they come up short.

I expect a wave of internet users to get upset and call paying for used services “enshittification”, because people don’t realise how much running these AI models actually costs.

I am so tired of this bullshit. Every time I’ve turned around, for the past thirty years now, I’ve seen some variation on this same basic song and dance.

Yet somehow, in spite of supposedly being burdened with so much expense and not given their due by a selfish, ignorant public, these companies still manage to build plush offices on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet and pay eight- or even nine-figure salaries to a raft of executive parasites.

When they start selling assets and cutting executive salaries, or better yet laying them off, then I’ll entertain the possibility that they need more revenue. Until then, fuck 'em.

Would you refuse to visit websites that force registration even if the account is free?

I already generally do.

What’s all the fuss about, you don’t care?

I honestly don’t much care, but that’s because western civilization is circling the drain, warped and undermined at every turn by wealthy and powerful psychopaths, and it’s just not worth it to care, since there’s absolutely nothing I can do to stop them

Is advertising a necessary evil in fair trade for content?

Some sort of revenue stream is potentially necessary, but that’s the extent of it. Advertising is just one revenue stream, and even if we limit the choices to that, there are still many different ways it could be implemented.

The specific forms of advertising to which we’re subjected on the internet are very much not necessary. And they don’t exist as they do because the costs of serving content require that much revenue - they exist as they do to pay for corporate bloat - ludicrously expensive real estate and facilities and grotesquely inflated salaries for mostly useless executive shitheads.

Would this limit your visiting of websites to only a narrow few you are willing to trade personal details for?

Again, that’s what I already do, so it would just add more sites to those I won’t visit.

Is this a bad thing for the internet experience as whole, or just another progression of technology?

At this point, the two are almost always one and the same. Internet technology is primarily harnessed to the goal of maximizing income for the well-positioned few, and all other considerations are secondary.

Is this no different from using any other technology platform that’s free (If it’s free, you’re the product)?

This is cynically amusing on Lemmy.

Should website owners just accept a lower revenue model and adapt their business, rather than seeking higher / unfair revenues from privacy invasive practices of the past?

Of course they should, but they won’t, because they’re psychopaths. They’ll never give up any of their grotesque and destructive privilege, even if that means that they ultimately destroy the host on which they’re parasites.

This behaviour makes you and by extension mbin seem like a bunch of unhinged petty drama queens.

Personally, there’s already absolutely no way I’m ever going to use mbin, no matter what, just because these people nauseate me.

deleted by creator

I prefer a much simpler solution: the threadiverse remains decentralized, with all that that entails, and all of the people who can’t cope with that leave.

It doesn’t matter how much money he has - every time I visualize Musk posting to Twitter, I see him as a teenage edgelord in a shabby suburban tract house, hunched over an off-the-shelf desktop PC in a room with green shag carpeting and fake wood paneling, lit only by the glow from the screen, giggling to himself.

The thing I really can’t understand, and a likely consequence of the ubiquity of apps, is all of the people who can’t seem to function without them.

Like when the Reddit exodus to the threadiverse happened, people started immediately crying for Lemmy apps. And it doesn’t seem to matter that much how bare-bones or unstable one might be - the important thing is that it’s an app. That’s all that seems to matter to them.

It’s as if they aren’t even aware of the fact that these are all websites, so they all work in a browser - as if to them, an app is a necessity and they can’t figure out how to accomplish anything otherwise.

Right, but that wasn’t really my point. I mean “artificial intelligence,” as the term has come to be used in this current world in which, for example, film and television producers want to have large language models write scripts, is a substitute for intelligence, in that people who don’t possess actual intelligence want to use it to create strings of words with which to impress other people who don’t possess actual intelligence. It’s pretend intelligence by and for people who don’t possess the real kind.

It just struck me that artificial intelligence is an accurate term after all, just in a different sense than the classic idea of a non-living consciousness.

It’s “artificial intelligence” in that it’s a substitute for real intelligence.

Of course they did. That’s the next step in the perpetual war assembly line.

Right, but of course if you don’t subscribe to it (and nobody else does) then it doesn’t.

So, for instance, if you go in through an account on a narrowly specialized instance, you’re potentially not going to see a lot of the communities from other instances at all, even on their All, just because nobody’s bothered to subscribe to them. And you’ll likely see highly specialized communities that fit well with that instance that you might not see anywhere else.

The smaller the instance is, the more likely that is.

I have accounts on a couple of small instances on which I haven’t even bothered to subscribe to anything, since their All already matches what I want frim the instsnce.

Right, which on a side note is most of why I have accounts on a number of different instances and regularly switch between them - because each instance is at least subtly different, since they each have different userbases, and thus somewhat different sets of subscribed and thus federated communities.

It’s less efficient than a centralized forum would be, but efficiency isn’t the only or even the highest priority. Decentralization is the explicit point of the fediverse, and to the degree that that requires sacrificing some measure of efficiency, that’s just the way it goes.

The goal was to build a system that would be robust and relatively seamless while remaining decentralized. That’s more or less what they’ve done. There’s a fair amount of fine tuning and tweaking left to be done, and actively being done, but the basic system is what it is because it best balances all of the goals.

As already noted, on all of them.

The easy way to grasp how it works:

When you, on instance.alpha, view a community on instance.beta, you aren’t actually on community@instance.beta. You’re actually on an entirely separate copy - community@instance.beta@instance.alpha. That’s the community you’re reading and posting to and upvoting/downvoting in. Meanwhile, people on other instances are each on their own locally hosted copies of the same community.

The lemmy software (or kbin or mastodon or whatever) then periodically syncs up all the local copies of community@instance.beta, so you all end up looking at (more or less) the same content, even though it’s actually a bunch of technically separate communities.

Why should that difference matter, in particular when it comes to the principle I mentioned?

Because creative works are rather obviously fundamentally different from physical objects, in spite of a number of shared qualities.

Like physical objects, they can be distinguished one from another - the text of Moby Dick is notably different from the text of Waiting for Godot, for instance

More to the point, like physical objects, they’re products of applied labor - the text of Moby Dick exists only because Herman Melville labored to bring it into existence.

However, they’re notably different from physical objects insofar as they’re quite simply NOT physical objects. The text of Moby Dick - the thing that Melville labored to create - really exists only conceptually. It’s of course presented in a physical form - generally as a printed book - but that physical form is not really the thing under consideration, and more importantly, the thing to which copyright law applies (or in the case of Moby Dick, used to apply). The thing under consideration is more fundamental than that - the original composition.

And, bluntly, that distinction matters and has to be stipulated because selectively ignoring it in order to equivocate on the concept of rightful property is central to the NoIP position, as illustrated by your inaccurate comparison to a pen.

Nobody is trying to control the use of pens (or computers, as they were being compared to). The dispute is over the use of original compositions - compositions that are at least arguably, and certainly under the law, somebody else’s property.

Of course it’s Crowder at the forefront of this - the narcissistic manchild who was caught on-camera being such a vile piece of shit to his eight-month-pregnant then-wife that even his biggest simps couldn’t pretend that it was defensible.

This is exactly what it would look like - https://www.thereset.news/p/exclusive-video-reveals-steven-crowder

I block every one I see, without exception.

I find google works fine if I’m just looking for general information on a simple topic, because it will dependably return a link to the wikipedia entry and a few of the most popular sites.

And I find that it’s pretty much useless for specific information about narrow topics, because it’s still just going to return the same general shit.

I’m not sure exactly how the change worked, but some time back (it’s been a year or two now, and maybe more - it’s just something that I sort of slowly realized had happened), they shifted to a system that made Google Fu essentially useless.

It used to be the case that you could define the importance of search terms by the order in which you listed them and make some effectively required by putting quotation marks around them.

But starting a couple of years back, it’s been generally ignoring search term order and quotation marks, and instead giving priority to specific common (and certainly not coincidentally common marketing) terms.

To anthropomorphize, it’s as if it’s developed a cripplingly narrow focus. So if, for instance, you’re looking for the title of some specific movie, it doesn’t matter how many other search terms you include or what order you list the terms in - if you include the term “movie,” that’s what it’s going to focus on. So if you’re lucky, you might get the actual movie you’re looking for, but it’s absolutely guaranteed that you’re going to get streaming services and “18 movies with real blood” style clickbait.