They hook you into an ecosystem. That’s it, thats the game. I don’t think it has too much to do with insecurity. Group chats and video chats with people outside of imessage is awful. Group chats lose a lot of features because SMS was all there was for a long time. Standard (not Google-ified) RCS is still too bare at the moment so I don’t think the looming rcs fixes that aspect of it.
It’s easy for people to cherrypick with groups.
There are tons of antisemitic leftists. I’ve had to heavily curate my social media because of them, and I’m lucky because that’s all I’ve had to do (eg, I’m not being chased across college campuses or doxxed for belonging to a synagogue or have people waiting outside of my door to hound me immediately).
But there are tons of leftists who aren’t as well.
Leftism has become co-opted as way for people to virtue signal and rationalize things they want to believe. The right is definitely seizing on this strife. But historically, there’s nobody the left likes to fight more than other leftists.
And the meme at the top about immigrants… that isn’t new. The USSR was famous for establishing ethnostates and it carries over to modern day. Sure, you could immigrate. But it isn’t like workers held hands and ignored the differences. The pressure was there, but perhaps not the wage pressure. Out groups were still blamed for things like shortages and service degradation, just like today. Nor a defense of anti immigration, but people seem to think the problem exists in uneducated or unenlightened people close to be leftwing. Nope, it’s our cohort. We are watching it in real time right now.
I hear what you’re saying, but that is exactly why Discord is shit for official communities like in the meme. There’s no reason why an open source project should rely on Discord for troubleshooting and feature requests and enthusiasm. Discord was meant for things like video games and friend chats, not instances where data discovery is paramount to growing the community.
There is a reason thar Discord communities trend toward toxic, and it is the insular weirdness that the platform enables and reinforces. Forums make much more sense for projects. Discord ends up with a bunch of no lifers ruining the communities. Been through it far too often with things like genre appreciation groups to open source projects. Reminds me of being a kid and encountering the, frankly, losers chasing people out of IRC.
And the hardware is often total junk. There’s a reason people still recommend the Shield, a device which is 5 years old and runs Android 9.
People here don’t want to hear it, but using an Apple TV will ruin the experience for everything else from a hardware perspective. Software aside, of course. There’s no reason for Android devices to exist on such sub par hardware. And yet…
Probably depends on your subs. Most of mine have went far, far left and have become a tiresome dog pile of virtue signaling from behind keyboards and screens.
And I’m a leftist. There seems to be a huge difference these days in being a leftist and being a “this is now my only personality trait” leftist through which all views must be fundamentally filtered. Even non-political/non-social. It has made some subs unreadable for me, specifically my state and city subs.
Edit: I guess where I am going with it is that the extremes are becoming more extreme and seeking out new frontiers now that moderation is light.
Those companies learned their lesson from search engines. They gave it away for free for far too long and with too few strings attached. It became impossible to realistically gate features and charge for them.
But chatbots, on the other hand, just need a little big money razzle dazzle and, boom, now it is AI and people are conditioned to accept any limits thrown at them.
Yep. Heck, it is rough even for those of us who won the housing lottery. If we ever want to move it means paying incredibly inflated prices (even with big gains on the sales of our own homes) and now crazy rates. Probably why prices haven’t really come down: few are selling. Golden handcuffs.
There are many factors at play. Surely, a huge one is status. It’s why one of the most desireable keywords to associate with vehicles (as picked by buyers) is “luxurious.”
But then there is everything else. My state requires annual inspections. And you must fully repair that vehicle, including to modern emission specs, before it is legal and able to be registered. That alone will cost more than a beater in many cases since they are, well, a beater. A vehicle so old it is essentially driven until it is in a state of disrepair. As someone else said, saving money becomes difficult with a beater eventually because the cost of repairing it to keep it legal eventually outpaces your savings if you aren’t operating on a short timeline.
Personally, I make good money and still drive my old vehicle because it is good enough. I have peers who do the same: our priorities are elsewhere, like paying for private school tuition for the kids or whatever. But I also know howmit ends eventually: accidents, causes by other people, which totals your vehicle because it’s value is so low or damage so significant. And there isn’t a lot of beaters on the market here anymore. So people are forced to buy new or take a slight discount for used (insomuch as monthly payments go). Used prices are just that crazy.
Could be that Apple will acquire DuckDuckGo. A little hasty to presume it I suppose, but Apple has to wonder how much money they are leaving on the table by taking Google’s payments. If Google will pay them more than $9 billion/year just to be default—what does that say about how profitable Apple’s absolutely huge and locked-in base can be?
The problem in this scenario is that the biggest player will still have an opportunity to dominate. Proof of work blockchain? Well, Amazon just has to outspend all the others—which they can handily do, or run computation on AWS. Similar with staking, except worse because more money = more direct influence.
Our local stores, as discussed in other comments, can’t even offer shipping or workable websites. And we expect them to self administer part of that blockchain? They are just going to pay Amazon to do it.
And big data companies like Amazon would love to peer into the blockchain and see the throughput for each of these competitors and discover patterns. Edit: and they already do that for vendors selling on Amazon, which is where all these Amazon-branded products come from.
That’s probably the biggest turn off to the MBA-types; it would require sharing information, even if obfuscated.
This is most definitely a feature here. What ARS won’t say (but their source articles do) is that Newsbreak is an app right out of China. That’s why they don’t care that this creates entirely fictional stories. This is the leftwing equivalent of all those rightwing agitprop sites that pretend to be local news in order to trick people