Literally Spez right now…

(I’d post the uncensored image but IIRC Lemmy World is German-based and have strict laws against Nazi iconography)

He’s wilfully given the data of users who have criticized Trump and ICE, AND he looks like a spitting image of Tintin…

Tell that to the families of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good.

Kamala lost because it was obvious from the beginning that she was a bad candidate whose only hope of becoming President was to be parachuted into the role via the 25th Amendment once Biden’s mental state truly deteriorated. Unfortunately for her and the DNC, Biden’s condition declined right as a key presidential debate rolled around, and his declining cognitive health became so utterly apparent that not even Reddit’s tyrannical cabal of power mods could cover it up anymore.

Before that debate, even merely suggesting that Biden was senile would have gotten you labelled a Nazi and banned from at least a dozen subreddits.

THAT is why she lost to a convicted felon.

Why does he look like Steve Carrell playing a sociopathic big tech asshole?

Kids back in the eighties were coding in BASIC, running command line prompts and using home computers like the ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC 464 and Commodore 64. The most I did in terms of coursework for my IT classes during my secondary school days was make a personal webpage about my hobbies & interests using Microsoft Frontpage. Sixth form (where I did A Level Computing, basically 11th & 12th Grade equivalents) was even worse, It was 2010 and they were still fucking teaching us Visual Basic 6 and the Waterfall Model of system development!

Something like an introduction to unix and programming should be mandatory. They seem to think that kids need to “learn to use a computer and the internet.” It’s a fucking point-and-click interface. What is there to learn? The software industry is very skilled at making it all so easy that a chimpanzee can use it.

This may be infuriating or sad for you to read, but very young kids who have been brought up on smartphones, TikTok and YouTube Kids these days can’t even do basic shit like this. Like, I’ve genuinely heard about kids starting kindergarten and reception who cannot even turn pages on a book and try to swipe left/right on them like they’re a touchscreen. Some even struggle to work with a physical keyboard or a gamepad that actually has tactile inputs.

The only other group where I’ve personally seen such ineptitude with technology is in old people. I used to work in customer support for a major right-wing British newspaper, and it was mainly things like website account access issues, basic tablet/smartphone tech support, and promotion enquiries I dealt with. I genuinely hated that job for a lot of reasons, but a big part of it is that trying to guide a senile 75+ year old pensioner through a basic password reset or explain how to redeem an e-voucher.

My dad is 80 years old and as the younger autistic one in the family who got economically screwed and is still living with my parents, I’m left with having to continually explain how to do basic email or phone tasks to him.

We didn’t have graphing calculators in school. The most we used were scientific ones which had sine, cosine, factorials, that kind of stuff.

This may be the millennial in me talking but I’ve generally found schools to be fucking dire when it comes to implementing technology in the classroom.

During Year 10 (equivalent to 9th Grade for any Yanks here), our school enrolled in a government programme to start using PDAs in the classroom. So they offered every kid in our year a Pocket LOOX 720 at a heavily subsidized price.

They were never used in lessons.

Pupils instead used them as music/video playback devices and to play games, since it was 2007, smartphones weren’t yet a thing and YouTube was just in its infancy.

Maybe things have improved since I left secondary school.

Neville Chamberlain tried to appease Hitler by letting him remilitarize the Rhineland, annex Austria and invade Czechoslovakia. Look at how well that worked out.

If National Rally were in any position of power, this easily could have become France’s Reichstag Fire moment.

The tech and entertainment industries have slowly eroded any and all moral arguments against piracy.

Streaming and digital distribution have led to situations where we no longer own the media we buy. We could buy a licence to access an app, song, show or movie and then have our access revoked at any time for any reason, and maybe we’ll get a refund if we’re lucky…

Landmining terms of service with clauses banning class action lawsuits and imposing forced arbitration have become increasingly common and is further eroding our consumer rights so if a company does fuck us financially, we’re SOL.

Then we have companies like Nintendo that have litigated hard against emulators, ROM sites and third-party flash carts which have given access to old games that Nintendo otherwise have little interest in making available on modern hardware - in some cases bankrupting people like Gary Bowser for life with seven-figure judgements in the process.

We now have a substantial risk of more shows, games, songs, movies and other forms of media becoming lost because of this.

But the biggest kick in the teeth has come from the AI industry.

Hosting pirated streams of PPV events or sports matches locked behind expensive cable channels, or even selling modded Fire Sticks that enable piracy can earn you significant prison time and a massive fine. Yet training LLMs on copyrighted works without the rightsholders’ knowledge, consent or compensation is apparently perfectly fine and not landing people like Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg behind bars?

The Machiavellian part of me thinks Ring screwed up by not raising the stakes. Search Party and the way they advertised it makes you go "awww’ when you see the golden retriever and then “wait, WHAT?” when they show all their Ring doorbells going full surveillance mode in locating the missing dog.

A lengthier ad showing a pedophile being tracked down and arrested by law enforcement mid-abduction, their victim rescued, then the nonce being served justice may have had a more positive response.

I mean, “think of the children” has been the perfect strawman argument to justify mass surveillance, after all…

Dailymotion does it too.

I forgot Dailymotion existed. Clicked on there, it’s just news sites and games journalists on the front page now. You can’t see view counts or any comments, and the site honestly feels like a husk of its former self.

I was barely able to remember the name of Google’s gen AI. It’s not really relevant in the corporate world. I don’t think they are close to whooping OpenAI and Microsoft’s asses.

Veo 3. It released weeks before and is almost up there with Sora 2 for output quality.

As for Microsoft, Copilot is absolute dogshit, whilst the quality of Windows 11 updates have nosedived to the point where Satya Nadella’s claim that the corporation is producing 30% AI generated code may actually be true, based on how much things have broken.

It’s gonna take a whole lot more than manifesting and positive affirmations to unfuck this reality.

Now this is a name change I can get behind!

On one hand, I’m so glad to be British and not living under Trump’s jurisdiction.

But on the other hand, I don’t think I’m gonna be visiting the USA anytime soon, unless I feel like being detained by ICE or turned away at the border for being critical of the orange man and the Gestapo he’s empowered.

Google are still a major player because they hold monopolies in several markets. I see them as “too big to fail.”

No other platform does long form user-generated video content like YouTube. The only other smartphone, tablet and smart watch OS that even holds a candle to Android is a walled garden exclusive to the Apple ecosystem. Even in search they hold a near-total monopoly with around 85 - 95% of all search traffic going through them (depending on which source you ask and if they consider ChatGPT a search engine.) Even Microsoft offering gift card rewards for using Bing search wasn’t enough to convince people to try them.

Even in markets where they don’t have a monopoly… GMail is the most popular free email service, Fiber has silently grown to have service in 19 US states despite significant pushback and lobbying from rival internet service providers, they’re the only viable alternative to Microsoft in the office productivity software market, virtually every major web browser except for Firefox is built on Chromium, even Waymo is the only (non-Chinese) robotaxi service currently in operation although that market is potentially going to blow up.

Even in the generative AI market they’re not only whooping OpenAI’s and Microsoft’s asses, but can reliably hedge their bets on AI if the bubble does start burst.

Not quite perma’d but I did get banned from a default sub recently over a banal comment that some power tripping cuck power mod didn’t like and saw as ban-worthy. Not even gonna bother appealing it because I know in true Reddit fashion they’ll respond with a “fuck you” and 28 day modmail mute, then cwy hawassment to the admins if I try to push it any further.

Maybe this is a sign that Reddit truly is turning to shit.

At this rate midterms are gonna be as Fair and Balanced™ as a Fox News bulletin.

Fucking hell. You were not kidding. This was posted five days ago! The comments on that review are even more vile, to the point where I don’t even think I can show them here.