Skepticism is good. However, there is a lot of evidence that Gen Z is quite tech illiterate in general, but especially compared to the Millennial cohort. Colleges and universities have had to force Gen Z students into basically remedial computing courses just to teach them how file systems work and other simple-yet-taken-for-granted concepts work. Drop rates for CS degrees are climbing as Gen Z moves into higher education and hits a very difficult wall for them.

And, in the end, that last bit was definitely another scam targeting their relative ignorance in the space. That is why so many “influencers”/scam artists target/targeted them with “career guides” or code boot camps or whatever. And I think that disillusionment is also part of the backlash against devs in general as “tech bros” despite very few devs actually working in the Valley for those companies under those conditions.

Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do

Temu is legitimately malware. The company had their source dumped and they obfuscated their malware-like practices to avoid Google’s automatic detection. I presume they did the same with their iOS client. It is very telling that they have been extremely successful despite the same exact company and team doing this before with another app, Pinduoduo. That’s right; same dev team and everything. Temu goes above and beyond the normal surveillance capitalism stuff we are used to and circumvents system security in order to sell your raw data on the market. The entire scheme isn’t to build a retail space (although it is doing that as well); it is to get as many people to download the app so they can steal an absurd amount of data which is normally protected.

That’s not accurate. The article is about Australia. Netflix Australia had a net loss of 200K subscribers specifically due to the anti-consumer moves they’ve made which affects a lot more than just sharing a password with a family member. That’s a 3% decline in a major country. Meanwhile, Netflix rivals had subscriptions increase overall and several saw huge surges. Netflix remains #1 by total subscribers in Australia, but that shouldn’t shock anyone given the inherit momentum they possess.

The article was never about Netflix globally. It was always about Australia. Companies operate business units in regions, and each region must perform.

The comments are just so much worse than the top posts. It is akin to Twitter after Musk pushed the main active user base away in exchange for a Faustian deal with right wingnuts. That or Reddit was truly duplicitous in their messaging and are perfectly fine taking money from propaganda organizations running in other countries which can pay the API fees to push narratives still. Not that they’d want that before an IPO or anything…

Microsoft has been slowly building toward requiring these subscriptions for enterprise for some time now. That is where Windows365 is ultimately going at an enterprise level, management just doesn’t realize it yet or are aware of how powerless they are to stop it.

Because Microsoft should’ve been broken up in the 90s. They definitely need to be broken up now. Same with a number of companies really, but Microsoft has a unique position to really hold enterprise and government by the balls.

Well one thing we can all agree on: it is a blessing to non-working capitalists who own huge stakes of Microsoft.

Because this will require expensive per-seat subscriptions to their Power Platform or Azure Services. And if Power Platform is any indication, likely some features of Python will be gated behind per-use models on top of that.

Others have pointed out that the article is jumping to conclusions by excluding the very and actually well documented economic factors at play here.

It is crunchy/granola technophobia. People need to keep in mind that popular (scientific, for the time) opinion used to be that excessive reading was had for children and adults. It is as old as our written records actually, going back to a handful of Greek historians warning about it even.

If people wanted the best for babies then we’d be raising them in collectives, with multigenerational households being the norm and free food, healthcare, and childcare widely available with few string attached. Some places already are close to all of those things.

But it is so much easier to clutch pearls and blame the iPad. It isn’t like brains shut off. They also used to argue that video games causes inadequate social and motor skill development and now fucking surgeons play games to build motor skills.

I’m sure we’ll hear that screentime proclaims “hail Satan” just as soon as they find a way to play the iPad in reverse.

Considering they are probably on the side of iMessage, I’m going to venture a guess and say the company size has nothing to do with it.

Meta is deeply unethical, even for a giant company.

I agree that most people don’t need SUVs. And even more don’t need a truck. But few others are forced to drive as much nor as far as Americans on a daily basis, so we don’t give a shit if people in other countries with robust public transport sometimes have to drive places in their (comparatively) small countries with their families.

TIL that a dubious 15% is also === 95%.

Edit: that is to say, this isn’t as simple as “LOL Americans fat, Americans dumb.” The same old Euro arguments don’t work on this one. Civil planning is completely fucked here. It isn’t just bad, it is actively hostile to non-drivers.

And SUVs in particular can get these massive tax advantages that cars don’t get. Same with some models of truck. Plus, marketing is highly effective and nearly totally unregulated like so much else over here.

You have morons giving themselves brain damage for the right to own gas stoves, and we have similar morons suffocating themselves and everyone else by insisting they need huge vehicles. And the government actively encourages it.

The US should really just directly employ regional workers to handle these projects. Corruption and nepotism are rampant in public construction projects, and the profit motive requires an inefficient use of tax dollars since we must pay a completely useless margin just so somebody can become richer for doing zero work.

We also need to stop expanding highways since additional lanes have been proven to not help congestion, and actually worsens it because it encourages more driving.

It isn’t even that. America, Germany, and the UK are all very similar. And those numbers are only becoming more similar over time.

Europeans need to remember that American states are often larger than European countries.

And that generations of neglect or intentional sabotage has rendered public transport completely useless outside of outlier scenarios.

People want to handwave it away, but there are legitimate safety concerns with driving smaller vehicles in the US. Not only are they less comfortable (in a country where you have to drive everywhere, for long periods of time, even for incidental items). They will get destroyed by our obnoxiously huge SUVs and trucks. Happens all the time.

Same thing needs to be remembered when people who don’t live here insist everyone should just be biking everywhere. I agree in spirit, but the reality is that biking in the US is a gamble every time someone does it. And you can’t convince a populace to do it when a normal American is 10+ miles away from a grocery store, and when most of our states experience both extreme heat and extreme cold.

The problem is truly systemic. We have a majority of civil planning intentionally implementing hostile engineering to incentivize vehicles.

Those companies aren’t supplying telecom kit.

I don’t know what you mean by R&D “taxes.” Do you mean profits that go into R&D? Tax breaks which Microsoft and others exploit to the maximum under the guise of “R&D” to lower their burden to negotiable (for them) amounts?

Regardless, there’s a huge difference between a bad company like Microsoft and one like Huawei. China is absolutely notorious for modern day industrial espionage. Anyone who denies it has to be delusional. And they lose their shit when their own tactics, like forced technology transfers and requirements to partner with domestic firms, are applied to them in equal measure.

Let’s look at Huawei for example. They straight up plagiarized a huge amount of code from Cisco. This includes esoteric bugs and their error messages. This isn’t a Oracle vs Google “same name of API” thing.

Europe should really subsidize their own tech sector so they don’t have to rely on China or the US for vital infrastructure.

They are definitely turning on Jesus and have been for quite some time now. There is an interesting statement from the former head of SBC wherein he states churchgoers are finding Jesus’ supposed teachings as being too woke and part of a liberal agenda. Can’t make this up. It was only a matter of time.

But Jesus also didn’t like mixing. That is why he instructed the apostles and other adherents to never teach gentiles and Samaritans. That was retconned years later by the church because they said people had visions of a resurrected jesus commanding them to mix with gentiles. But for a while there it was very much a racial/ethno in-group only. That is why Jesus supposedly stated he taught in parables; so gentiles wouldnt understand what he was talking about and find salvation. That is what Matthew 13:11-17 is about.

People need to stop characterizing Jesus as some socialists woke advocate like I see in this thread. His character wasn’t. He didn’t preach universal love and compassion, and he taught contradictory messages about pacifism probably because dozens of people created this character over centuries.

I honestly think people want to think the religion can’t be that bad and that the adherents are just awful.

I don’t think it does. I doubt it is purely a cost issue. Microsoft is going to throw billions at OpenAI, no problem.

What has happened, based on the info we get from the company, is that they keep tweaking their algorithms in response to how people use them. ChatGPT was amazing at first. But it would also easily tell you how to murder someone and get away with it, create a plausible sounding weapon of mass destruction, coerce you into weird relationships, and basically anything else it wasn’t supposed to do.

I’ve noticed it has become worse at rubber ducking non-trivial coding prompts. I’ve noticed that my juniors have a hell of a time functioning without access to it, and they’d rather ask questions of seniors rather than try to find information our solutions themselves, replacing chatbots with Sr devs essentially.

A good tool for getting people on ramped if they’ve never coded before, and maybe for rubber ducking in my experience. But far too volatile for consistent work. Especially with a Blackbox of a company constantly hampering its outputs.

It all depends on your tolerance.

FireSticks are inherently easier to tinker with. But Amazon bends you over with shoving ads and spyware up your ass at every opportunity. It is baked into the UI design itself. It is very advertising-forward, with everything else designed around ads. And even the 4K max lags at times.

AppleTV really requires an iPhone to set up optimally. And it is locked down with no clear jail break at this time for most people unless you’re willing to solder (or if I’ve missed a new flaw in an update which opened the door programmatically). But Apple TV is fast and smooth, with no inherent ads of its own. It is honestly over powered for its purpose, probably because it can also play a fair number of iOS games.

Chrome Cast with Google TV is a fucking mess. It is severely under powered to the point of lagging. It has half baked ideas like profiles which don’t change anything. And it has ads as the focus of the design just like FireStick.

But you’re going to pay a subscription if you go with Apple TV and want something like Infuse. Jellyfin and Plex, of course, don’t require it.

And despite what people say, Stremio is absolute dogshit on a FireStick because of its mobile-centric UI.

If you plan to use a server like Plex and Jellyfin, all of them work—but Apple TV works best. If you need anything else out of it, probably the fire stick if you use a pihole to stop it from phoning home for more ads constantly.

Here’s the post from the official Calckey account. Mali is, indeed, seizing domain names. Makes me wonder what is happening with Lemmy.ml. I really don’t want to get involved with Matrix just to find out.

LemmyGrad.ml is still up, though. For now.

I’d argue that it is a Samsung thing. They let carriers do this. Just like they host ads in the notification shade and first party apps in some markets.

To Samsung. One of the largest companies in the world. Samsung chooses to allow this because they get money for it from the carriers.

I think people are justified in having strong emotions on this topic. A good amount of us just came from Reddit, only to waltz right into what feels like another corporate power play. You install smoke detectors before you have a house fire, not during it.

Many of us have been burned by Meta and purposefully choose these more obscure communities, like Lemmy, to stay far away from them. Meta, after all, has waged a worldwide assault on democracy. Meta has aided literal genocide in at least one country. Meta has run undisclosed psychological experiments to see if it could alter the mood of its users and make them depressed, without regard for if children were among the swath of people.

A lot of people are old enough to remember similar takeovers of standards and open protocols, which is why XMPP comes up so often in these discussions. All it takes is one big player with God-levels of money in order to usurp a standard. Google’s done it twice now, for instance. First with XMPP and again with RCS.

Meta deserves zero benefit of doubt. They’ve always been a bad actor and parasite. I don’t buy the conspiracy theory that admins are being paid by Meta. That does seem hysterical.

The most likely reason I’ve heard for Threads embracing ActivityPub (eventually) is to circumvent EU regulations. In which case we shouldn’t be fine with being a pawn and should resist aiding an objectively harmful company from avoiding due regulation.

The good news is that I think Gavin may have already fixed it. I’m using the latest TestFlight build. Gavin said he submitted it to the AppStore just maybe 20 minutes ago, so fingers crossed.

There’s also a new neat app icon.

I agree about the bubble effect. I feel it, too, even though I don’t consider myself in a bubble. I truly am enjoying Lemmy and the conversations more than anything else even somewhat similar to it. The smallish nature of the community probably combined with the slightly elevated bar for joining means the riff raff isn’t here in large numbers yet.

Lemmy, today, honestly reminds me of Reddit 15 years ago.

Perhaps this is the bubble effect, but I have a high confidence level in the major third party devs being able to streamline the sign up process. It is already happening in some apps.

The stability problems are another story. I encourage people to go to the front page of their respective communities and look for donation links. Even $1/mo on Patreon can snowball into large sums as Lemmy.World shows.