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DocTomoe

1,932 karmajoined 11 yıl önce

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DocTomoe
·dün·discuss
The UK is a silly place[1] and has been pretty Orwellian for a long time. It is not a sensible idea to extrapolate their approach to a post-eu situation in the current member states.

As for burning down the house ... as it apparently seems to be the only legal route to stop the flies, alas, I'm willing to pay that price.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Npo0cmp-VY
DocTomoe
·4 gün önce·discuss
Nothing is brought to the Commission that local governments do not secretly want, but publically rage against because the voters are against it.

When Brussles then decides, 'there's nothing we can do, it's an EU thing' ... and a moustache-twirl.

The only thing that can stop this is to completely dismantle the EU. Which means, unfortunately, voting for people any good person should rightfully despise.
DocTomoe
·7 gün önce·discuss
Network effects are real. It is hard to convince people to move over to your platform if the selling argument is 'not quite there yet, but we got you covered on the minilib front, plus it's less usable because of our weird interpretation of our own data protection laws'.
DocTomoe
·9 gün önce·discuss
> BIFF WAS REAL.

Of course BIFF [1] was real - and he kept respawning.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIFF_(Usenet)
DocTomoe
·9 gün önce·discuss
A few thoughts.

First, many people back then did not have permanently-online systems. You loaded the new stuff, went off-line, read, answer maybe, and uploaded your answers.

That gave you some time for meaningful answers (and - if you went the flamewar route - be smarter about flaming. Some got an almost baroque way of hiding flames in meaningfully-sounding sentences, which was, at least, funny).

I loved the aspect of doing the filtering on my end - not by an admin who decided what or what not I was allowed to read based on their own political leanings. Everyone had a freedom of speech, and I had the freedom to listen.

Can kill files be implemented today? Sure they could - we already have a pre-filtering by the algorithm curating what we see - I get very few hobby horsing stuff in my feed, because that's just not what interests me. This is analogous to the olden days, where the group, and the entry barrier acted as a pre-filter.

In my part of the usenet, real names were considered 'good manners'. That changed how people talked to each others. Of course, no-one could check if you were really called Klaas Hinkelman - but xXxStoneFakker666xXx was promptly laughed away - or landed in the kill file. plonk.

Another aspect that I really liked - and kept until today, was quoting inline, picking out individual questions of what could be a long article, and going into detail, like this:

    > [question or observation about an aspect]

    [answer to said question or observation]
And there was no upvote / downvote system, no karma, nothing like that. This removed the incentive to be 'popular', it was enough to be interesting, or just 'more correct'. It was perfectly ok to share a link to your private homepage, or take information there. Because no-one 'owned' an usenet group, there was no walled garden.

It is my strong belief that what killed the internet was not the September that never ended™, but vote gamification.
DocTomoe
·9 gün önce·discuss
The generation before that (yours truly) still remembers the usenet glory days, and the liberal use of the kill file [1].

[1] https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/K/kill-file.html
DocTomoe
·11 gün önce·discuss
Both of these are meant for operating a home/private network.

.self seems to be geared towards a 'accessible from the everyday net' kind of approach.
DocTomoe
·11 gün önce·discuss
Please leave states out of this. The State™ is not your friend, and we don't need a future, even more criminal government to have access to the shutdown button of even more of our identity.

Note that I did not single out an individual coutnry. All governments always stride towards autocracy.
DocTomoe
·16 gün önce·discuss
Has Apple ever lowered the price of a product line?

This is just the new normal.
DocTomoe
·19 gün önce·discuss
As a relatively enthusiastic OpenAI user ...

what did you do to trigger a verification process?
DocTomoe
·24 gün önce·discuss
None of Ferris' books is younger than 10 years. Used copies are plentiful, hardly a library who has not been touched.

At some time, the market has been satisfied.
DocTomoe
·27 gün önce·discuss
Well, you can just give me a list of the domains you operate, and I can put them in the network blacklist.
DocTomoe
·27 gün önce·discuss
It was on for me again, 6 hours later.

Ah, another domain for the blacklist.
DocTomoe
·29 gün önce·discuss
> parents could be heard telling their kids 'don't stay up too late reading', as if it could be a problem. F

Having lived on this planet for a while now, I am under the impression that anything non-adults do always is a problem, no matter what it is.
DocTomoe
·29 gün önce·discuss
Late December 2010 was the last release of a Harry Potter movie, cutting off the movie -> book pipeline.
DocTomoe
·29 gün önce·discuss
So ... kids did read more in a time the single most influential kids book series was popular as compared to today? Surprise.

Kids did read more when stories were more about friendship, horses and/or adventure and sci-fi rather than pre-approved content-filtered social studies messaging? Surprise.

The obvious solution would be to force kids to read more from the approved reading list, courtesy by the school board⸮ That'll make them enjoy reading again⸮

(I am not saying technology is innocent in this development. I'm saying: there are several factors, and screen time is by far not the only one.
DocTomoe
·geçen ay·discuss
As a non-American, that mostly is a reaction to rabid US jingoism, as in the US claiming themselves as "Numba 1" in everything, when usually, they are in the 10s or 20s at best.

And to many Americans this is even worse: If you are not best™ or worst™ ... you are unremarkable, 'E pluribus unum'.
DocTomoe
·geçen ay·discuss
Some do, especially in Portugal and the Azores, for tea. And I grow my own peppers and chillies in cold Germany - why would we not be able to do so on an industrial scale?

Or you buy your tea from other first-world countries, such as Japan.
DocTomoe
·geçen ay·discuss
In the end, it is up to the consumer.

Local variants exist. But supermarkets are convenient and cheap.
DocTomoe
·geçen ay·discuss
The pattern is not broken, it works as designed. This is mostly a money-pump from government(s) to private interests, mostly sitting in large IT houses.