Reddit had this magical mix of: “The world is about to end”, “Now for something funny”, “Here is something interesting, but neutral”, “Here is a someone shitty getting away with something shitty”. Here it seems like it’s just posts about the world ending, corporations doing shitty things, and occasionally Linux/Reddit commentary.

Imagine going to the grocery store filling your cart with stuff and then checking out. Then you leave the cart behind and only take the receipt home with you. In this analogy, the NFT is the receipt that you get at the checkout counter and your cart is the actual picture file. Although you do usually get the picture file, anyone else can access it too.

Sure the receipt proves that you bought the thing, but you having the receipt only matters if somebody else cares.

The art world was actually a good target for NFTs because I can print out a picture of a Monet and hang it on my wall for basically free, but other people pay hundreds of millions of dollars for that same painting just because it’s “the real one”.

Technology is quickly becoming less and less about the underlying technologies and more about how the large corporations want you to use their product. I was briefly a volunteer website administrator for a small non-profit and despite having done freelance web development 15 years ago and knowing how to program HTML and several other web technologies, it was a struggle because they used Google on the backend and everything in Google was unintuitivly laid out and impossible to do without going through the Google interface. I often frustratingly joked that I was a Google administrator, not a web administrator.

Another example was some Linksys wireless mesh extenders I bought. The setup process involved using a privacy invasive app on your phone to connect with Bluetooth. It would try for 5 minutes and then just error with no error code. There is no manual setup process. There was no log file. When it didn’t work after 5 minutes of trying, it told you to call a phone number that was always busy and blocked the 5 minute connection process since it needs a phone to do both things. Eventually, after about 6 hours, it just randomly started working.

Combine that with people biologicaly becoming less able and willing to learn as they get older and it’s pretty likely that millennials will eventually get left behind even if they try to keep up to date.

As long as you wear eye protection like goggles or a snorkel mask, the ocean is amazing to look at underwater.

Company A raises prices and reports record quarterly profits. Company B is aware of this because both the price raising and quarterly profit report for Company A are public. Company B raises prices too so that they can get also get more profit. Company C either does the same thing, or there is no company C because rubber stamped mergers and acquisitions for decades have allowed a handful of companies to dominate every industry, sometimes multiple industries.

None of this is a conspiracy. It’s Econ 101 level “how things work.”

My girlfriend gets stuff from Temu sometimes. It’s basically ordering directly from China without the foreign middlemen, so the prices are really low, but the shipping times are really long. The product quality is about the same as anything else made in China, which is to say pretty good, but not the best.

I think fundamentally Mastodon can’t work. The entire point of Twitter is for celebrities, brands and governments to have a single place to be able to send out a public message and for that message to be seen by everyone, especially those who opt in to it by following. Decentralized alternatives by definition can’t do that. Centralization is the entire point of Twitter.

Decentralization does work for Reddit/Lemmy though, because they are content centric, not person centric. I don’t care who posts content to the subreddits I follow, just that the content exists, can be easily viewed (RIP third party Reddit apps, hello Lemmy!), and is interesting. Lemmy doesn’t need hundreds of millions of people in a single place to create enough content that is interesting, and in fact having fewer people makes the content that is posted more interesting and focused. Lemmy’s decentralization is a strength because if this instance doesn’t have the interesting content I want, I can just go elsewhere.